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.

Comments

Marketing = Low Thinking

[joshua404]

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?

The tools of their own demise

[billtom]

I, for one, am glad that the IAB publishes these standard ad sizes. It lets me know what images my filters should throw away.

Pop unders and pop ups work

[jmichaelg]

Yeah they pissed you and me off so we won't buy the product but that just says the ad didn't work on you or me. It doesn't say the ads don't work.

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.

Re:Internet advertising doesn't work, period.

[dboyles]

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 understand; you go from "Internet advertising doesn't work, period." to suggest a different kind of internet advertising, which would presumably work.

I think your topic is just misleading. Internet advertising is effective, but only if you follow basic advertising principles.

Porsche doesn't advertise during Saturday morning cartoons. Tampax doesn't advertise during the NCAA Final Four. Why should the internet be any different? It's not about view counts, it's about targeting advertising to a specific audience. That's why our personal data is so valuable that a company would give away software just to collect it.

No ad will never be large enough; here's why

[dcavanaugh]

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.

Advertiser's arms race is already ridiculous

[rknop]

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