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IAB Recommends Larger Web Advertising
Chicane-UK writes "Popups, flash adverts, full screen adverts and all the other methods of internet advertising that make our daily drag through the internet have been deemed not effective enough. The solution, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau is the new Universal Ad Package which comprises a new 'large advert' and three other in page advert templates. Read their press release here. I know I for one am sick of internet advertising of this type - banners were just about right for me." For some reason advertisers never come up with new, smaller advertising formats. There's also a story on AdAge.
Marketing is where the people who are full of buzzwords, mission statements, slogans and an overinflated sense of self-importance always wind up collecting. They perpetuate these ridiculous ad schemes not because they work, but because it keeps them in a job. Do -you- know anybody that's based a major purchase off of a popup ad on the Internet? Everyone I know immediately -loses- interest in a given product when assaulted by popup ads for it. Those little wireless camera thingies, for example. In theory, they seem pretty cool and they have a lot of practical uses (other than the implied use of spying on JC Penny catalog models per their ads). But I will smolder in Hell before I ever buy one because of their obnoxious advertising.. So who -is- buying them?
Yet, however, companies continue to pour money into losing ventures against the almighty click-through because of the Internet's explosive growth and this mistaken belief that people will click them.
News flash: this isn't the case. Whereas ads on television have a 50-year history to draw from, and whereas ads on TV are expected, most Internet surfers would say they're an annoyance and a hindrance to them. Contrast ads on TV--slick, designed to pique the viewer's interest, versus a huge window flashing saying, 'THERE MAY BE PORN ON YOUR COMPUTER! YOU ARE BROADCASTING AN IP ADDRESS, SO YOU'RE VULNERABLE.'
Instead of focusing on more obtrusive, bigger pieces of real estate, perhaps Internet advertisements would work if they leveraged the unique nature of the medium to get their point across. Flash and/or Java ads that are visually interesting and interactive have a better chance of setting clicks than big, flashing banners.
I don't know if I'd expect the ad community to get the message, though. They want us to see theirs, but won't listen to their audience to see what works.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
"As far as I am concerned, Internet adverts are just like magazine adverts. I don't notice those ones either (unlike TV adverts)."
You notice the lost time, especially when you're connected through a slow modem and pay by the minute... It is a huge bandwidth wasteage!
I, for one, am glad that the IAB publishes these standard ad sizes. It lets me know what images my filters should throw away.
Don't believe the ad worked? Before those ads came out, the sponsor was but a dim memory. Notice that you and I both know what camera ad you're talking about. That is exactly what a marketing department's job is - to get the company noticed.
Just because neither you nor I would care to be marketeers doesn't mean you need to diss them - they do serve a real function.
The problem is not size. People refuse to click the ads because nobody wants all the funky Javascript and browser tricks that interfere with going back to the original page.
I expect all kinds of shenanigans if I click a banner, therefore I don't do it. Any ads that cannot be suppressed with a proxy filter will be ignored. Making the ads larger will not change anything.
The real solution? A clean layout that showcases the ad well, delivering your ad to an audience who is actually interested, and not insulting the viewer with cheap tricks like animating nausea-inducing flashing colors. Penny Arcade has done this with its layout, and even with a smaller reader base they outperform ads from sites like IGN. To quote:
Here is another little behind the scenes look at the way advertising works on the internet. Game companies want animation. They want a fucking guy to parachute down from the top of your screen and land on the article you're trying to read. They want you to have to interact with their advertisement just so you can see the content you came for. Everyone who uses the internet knows that this kind of shit is just frustrating. Look at sites like IGN, Gamespot, or Gamespy. You can't read an article there without an animated bug crawling across your screen or some flash ad blaring shitty music. When we decided to do advertising we decided that we wouldn't ever run any kind of animated add. Some companies won't advertise with us because of it. Others, it's like pulling teeth to get a non animated ad out of them. They have this idea in their head that the only way their ads will be effective is if they are annoying as fuck.
Some of them are actually shocked when ads at PA out perform animated versions at other sites like IGN. Here we are just a little comic site and we kick their fucking ass. We tell them that if you don't insult people with shitty flash ads, they are much more likely to actually check out your game. I have never once clicked on a flash ad except to mute it or close it and I have a feeling you guys are pretty much the same. They just can't get it through their heads that people don't like to be annoyed by advertising.
I feel like we have a pretty good relationship you and I. Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like we treat you guys pretty well and I think that's why you treat us so well in return. You click on our ads and buy our stuff at an unbelievable rate. Those new Wang Fu shirts sold out in one fucking day. I mean that is some crazy shit. Tycho and I just want to say thanks. We have the best job in the world and we have it because of you guys. It seems like we should hug or something now.
End quote
To me, at least, it seems like current ad companies are ramming their head against this big wall of how to make effective advertising, and their solution seems to be to just ram their head harder against that same wall.
slashdot!=valid HTML
I'll never see them anyway. I use Mozilla.
:)
Temporarily, it will put more money in web sites' coffers through more advertising dollars, heavily subsidized by new and unsophisitcated users.
Long term, the preponderance of pop-ups will further motivate and/or educate IE and Netscape users to switch to Mozilla and use its cookie, image and popup blocking capabilities.
At some point, web sites will then have to learn a new way to make money other than pissing of thier users.
In the meantime, I'm unaffected.
Software Wars
A couple of months ago, I read something simlar. TV advertisers were bemoaning the fact that individual TV ads no longer have the effect they once did. Viewers are tuning out-- wether by fast-forwarding, or just by not really paying attention. Some of them went on to say that the problem partly was saturation. The fraction of the hour that has ads on a typical TV broadcast has grown, to the point that there are so many ads that no one ad stands out very much any more.
(My reaction to this, and to the surprise that came through in the article about this, was: well, duh!)
Then they go on to suggest the solution: in-programming advertising. Popups, effectively, in TV programs, more obvious and blatant than product placement.
So, the logic is: advertising has become so prevalent and overwhelming that the common consumer is starting to get desensitized to it. To solve this "problem", we need to make advertising even more prevalent and overwhelming.
Hello?
We're so in love with our marketing-driven society that we've become incapable of thinking any other way.
I predict that "popup-ads" during TV shows whould just drive more and more people away from broadcast TV and to watching either premium channels, renting movies, or (horrors) reading books. Broadcast TV will be shooting itself in the foot.
Similarly for web sites that don't think their ads are annoying enough right now. If they think that the solution is to make them more annoying, then users will either avoid their sites, or just use browsers that, in the increasing arms race, filter out the annoying ads. (Until the Fed. government outlaws those browsers, at which point the laws will become irrelevant since they are in conflict with what most of the population wants and does. Maybe eventually they will realize the short-sightedness of their current campaign finance model.)
I just shake my head when people seem to think that the solution to oversaturation of advertising is more in-your-face advertising. Don't they get it? Can't they take a lesson from Google, who subsists on advertising? Yeah, sure, Google is the #1 destination on the site, so they have it easy. Perhaps, though, nobody has considered that part of the reason Google is the #1 destination may be that their advertising is very minimally annoying....
-Rob
But the catch there is this : fake your connection and you'll only get a part of the content you could have if you were honest about your connection. In other words, sites could meter not only the ad type, but the content type of their site as well. Faking your connection as a 28.8 modem when you're sitting on a T1 would result in you not seeing full media like you would expect. For some people that may be fine, but for others they want to utilize all of their bandwidth, even if that means viewing fuller ads.
Of course, this would all have to be done on a site-by-site basis, but it would be a way for sites to cover high bandwidth costs. Larger, interactive advertisments would cost more, helping to pay for the more media-rich content that would be served to those being honest about their connection. Text ads would cost less, coinciding with the cost of serving text-only or close-to-text-only content.
Obviously this suggestion isn't the be-all/end-all, but perhaps it could be a start.