Are Plain-Text Ads Doomed?

friedegg writes "Usability expert Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox examines the future of text advertising on the web. Text based advertising has become increasingly popular recently partly because of Google's success with it. Nielsen notes that advertising works well on search engines because users visit them with the specific intent of going elsewhere. He also thinks it's only a matter of time before the novelty of text advertising wears off, and users develop "box blindness" in addition to their current "banner blindness." It isn't totally negative, though, as he thinks the low-end media format forces advertises to express a focused and succinct message that users may take more seriously."

Comments

In a word: NO

[Blaine Hilton]

I do not see text ads as being "doomed". Like anything they have their place in the world. On WebCalc I sell text-based ads and the advertisers seem to like them. I like them because they look much better then banners and are faster to load. However when you look at them they do not grab your attention as much as the traditional graphic ads do. This sounds bad, but I think it is really a benefit because it provides you with a smaller quantity of visitors, but those visitors are of a higher level of quality.

Many times with newer rich media ads people are trying to close them when in reality they click through. This upsets the user who would probably close the site right away. Using such distracting ads such as rich media that goes over the whole site (think Yahoo and Weather.com) and pop-ups alienate your website visitors.

As for targeting, search engines are not the only application for targeting. All websites can implement targeting. If I have a site that's geared for collage students then the best ad would be for somebody targeting that demographic, it doesn't matter what form of advertising it is. This statement is very much like comparing apples and oranges.

Go calculate something

Re:In a word: NO

[DeltaSigma]

I have to agree with Blaine Hilton. In the last month I've clicked on far more text ads ( about a dozen ) than I have graphic ads ( about zero ). They simply tend to be more informative and more attention grabbing for me. And it's not as if this can merely be explained away by "graphic-blindness." No sir, as a fellow web designer I do have a tendancy to evaluate each and every new ad for its content, placement, relevancy to the subject at hand, and general appeal. Slashdot is a good example. I must see a few dozen VB.net or other Microsoft ads in the topics each day.

I've never clicked on a single one of them. And not because I hate Microsoft. Afterall, I am just as intrigued as many others about what ".net" really means. The problem is that every .net ad I've seen of theirs is uninformative, and I am given the impression that clicking on the ad will merely bring me to the same uninformative page I viewed the first time.

It seems the only reason microsoft uses these graphic ads as opposed to text ads is because they know they have the money to afford them.

Marketing preferences also likely have a lot to do with the entire issue. I can walk over to the graphics department right now and start a discussion about advertising methods and it will be a matter of minutes before I hear that wonderful phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words."

I won't argue that a picture isn't "worth a thousand words." I assure you it is. But in the case of advertising, those thousand words are completely generated by the potential customer viewing them.

I seem to recall this one .net add that was merely a laptop (apparantly powered off) sitting on a pine table in front of some glass windows which gave way to some rather nice tree scenery.

Now there's a thousand words that come to mind with this image but what purpose did this ad end up serving in my case? Well I'll have you know that after viewing that ad I had successfully equated .net to computers. That's right, I now know .net runs on a computer.

And this was on some RIAA article.

Now let's take a text ad I saw on the same page. "Register your copyrights easily." Before I even clicked I knew there was a company willing to register my copyrights with the United States government via the internet for a fraction of the cost via lawyer. I clicked it, I read the entire page, I bookmarked, I loved it. I will likely use these guys later due to their marketing decision. Oh sure, they could have put up some random stock photo with a fountain pen resting atop a rather intimidating form that said "Skip the lawyer, skip the hassle." But that just wouldn't be as effective.

It all comes down to the medium on which these companies have chosen to advertise. This is the internet, not television. One can direct me to a page that says "buy now buy now buy now." I'll merely go somewhere else. However, if you create a good product, and put your best effort forward to give as much detail as possible about the product, its uses, what standards it adheres to, etc. etc. then I promise you, as a potential customer, that I will evaluate your product and consider buying.

Information goes on the internet. Pretty pictures go on the television. Easy.

And there's no better time than now to be doing this (are you listning Microsoft, Intel, Amazon?). With most companies still in the "pretty pictures sell stuff" paradigm there is no better time to begin a campaign of traditional advertising in traditional media, and informative advertising on the internet.

So c'mon, get over the dot-com-bust already and start advertising on the web the way it was MEANT to be done. With genuine information about genuine products!

Better have them plaintext

[thespare]

It's way better to have afs plaintext. Personally, I never click on huge flickering banners. First of all because they are *so* annoying, and second because 9 out of 10 times; if you click 1, you'll get a thousand popups after that trying to have you visit Bukakke-specials or Preteen teens or whatever 31337 pr0n those stupid websites have.

Can't we just ban them? :-)

A.

The google ads are useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Ads have their place. When I'm looking for a commercial alternative to something, the google list on the right is very useful.

My Experience

[waldoj]

On one of my websites, we switched to book-your-own text ads a few months ago. For the first month, the clickthru rates were astounding -- 5%-15% on some of them. Now, we're lucky to break 1%. The reason, of course, is obvious: they were new and interesting, and people noticed them because of that. Now, they are neither new nor interesting. They remain an amusing thing on the site, but they're not paying the bills, I'm afraid. All that we can do from here is continue to switch it up: move them around on the site, offer formats with bigger text, more words, etc. But that's not a solution, just a stall tactic.

-Waldo Jaquith

I've developed "Jakob Blindness"

[mblase]

With all due respect to his message of "Simplify, simplify", Nielsen is too passionate about his mission to be practical in applying it.

Just look at his site -- hasn't enjoyed any kind of redesign since he created it, or indeed any kind of design at all. There's nothing interesting on it, nothing inviting, nothing to indicate to someone that one thing is more important than another. In his vigor to keep his site accessible to text-only browsers he's completely ignored the visually unimpaired.

If his message today is that text-only ads will be ignored just as colorful graphical ones already are, then he himself should take this message to heart -- because text-only web sites are even easier to ignore.

Ads in General

[Luminous]

It is human nature to 'tune out' ads. They are so pervasive, it is the only way to accomplish anything. If I responded to every ad I see on a website, I wouldn't have time to actually do what I intended to do at the website.

With that element an accepted fact of advertising (people block out billboards, use TV commercials to grab something from the other room, flip channels on the radio when the 9 minutes of ads come on, and flip the ad pages in magazines to get to the content) advertisers still continue. Why? For that one or two people out of a thousand who respond to the ad.

I've done it. I see an interesting ad and I actually watch it. Or I see a banner ad for something unique and I click on it. Text ads are the same way, except I am more likley to read them (usually contain more information) and less likely to be annoyed by them (rarely flash, "vibrate", or make noise.)

Are they dying? No, they are settling.

Text ads work for some audiences

[MSBob]

I see text based ads as having a more "serious" audience. I would not advertise the latest server platform with a swoosh, bang flash movie. It calls for more maturity. A text ad is appropriate. Same if I advertise a whitepaper.

When it comes to selling the latest top 10 hit to a 15 year old however, that's a different story. A noisy flash ad may be just what's being called for.

Context is very important though. I don't want to be fed noisy, flashy ads when I'm reading technical articles... Actually I don't want to be fed noisy flashy ads at all, but I'm probably just an exception if the number of flash ads is anything to go by :)

People LIKE ads -- sometimes

[Alderete]

I think Nielsen's wrong here. I find that, for certain types of searches, I want to look at the ads. No, really! Here's an example. My wife and I have one of those WhirleyPop stovetop popcorn popping gizmos. It works reasonably well with regular popcorn and oil, but it's really, really spectacular if you get the pre-measured packets of popcorn, oil, and seasonings.

Right before last Thanksgiving, I went to Amazon.com and searched for WhirleyPop. I could buy more poppers, but not more supplies. So I went to Google. Google's search results (for "popcorn & WhirleyPop") were OK, but the ads were exactly what I was looking for -- vendors who could sell me something, fairly specialized, that's never available in any store I visit.

In this case, it was the ads, not the search results, that were interesting. All of those people were ready to sell me exactly what I wanted. Sometimes, ads are not ads, they are the results themselves.

Format doesn't matter, targetting does

[phorm]

Plain text banner-style ads might not do as well, especially long ones... but truly I appreciate them more than the annoying flash-type versions. Also, they show up much better than GIF's on links/lynx

An, as mentioned, effective short ads are very effective. For instance, when you're searching for "Digital Camera", and you get an immediate link on google to thinks like "prices on digital cameras on ebay/amazon" are still good forms of advertising. Not only are these ads short and sweet, but they're often actually relevant to what you're looking for, which flashy annoying banner-ads often are not.

I think it's not really a matter of getting ads that are flashy graphics or plain text-based, but more a matter of getting ads that are relevent (for graphic based, thinkgeek.com ads and many others on slashdot would be nicely targetted), In fact, when you think about it, there is a lot of advertising on slashdot, but most is relevant or from interested parties.

Re:Where advertising should really go

[jo_ham]

This could be a bit of a problem. I for one would be very dubious about clicking on a link like that.

It could be genuine, or it could be a hijacked page - remember Microsoft's "smart links" feature that would take keywords in your pages and make them into hyperlinks to sites it thinks you should visit?

It just seems a bit dodgy.

It's not that banner ads are annoying...

[Violet Null]

It's that they're often just not very informative. Too many banner ads seem to have been designed by marketers under the premise that if they get a mysterious hook set up, people will follow their ad to learn more. But that's not the way people work, either on-line or off.

Consider a TV commercial that showed, say, a cannon firing hamsters at the letters "outpost.com", with no explanation of who or what outpost.com actually was. The thing would fail, and fail miserably (and, in fact, has). But advertisers seem fixated that the same setup will work on the web, for some reason. At least 90% of the banner ads I see are setup like a hook (such as, "Looking for a new job?") rather than giving info (such as "Monster.com: Over three bazillion ad postings")

If more banner ads were informative -- giving me info on who the ad was for, where it would take me, and why I should be interested -- I bet they'd have a higher clickthrough rate. That's what Google's ads do. It's got nothing to do with whether the ad is graphical or not...until the ads start getting intrusive, at which point people are actively suppressing them.