Advertising happens to be a bit of push and pull between what advertisers want and what consumers want. In general, advertisers want more individuals to notice their ads. And in general, consumers wish to read what they want to see without having ads pushed in their faces. Somewhat of the conflict, isn't it?
This is particularly true on the Web. If you want your display ads to be noticed, you have to try more and more intrusive stunts big images, autoplay music and video, annoying animations, even ads that capture the page before customer performs some action. All this fancy stuff gets your ad noticed and hated by a majority of web users.
I must side with consumers on this one. I hate, absolutely despise, ads that interrupt my web browsing. I don't want to see an animated mascot cavort across my screen, obscuring what I'm attempting to read. I don't want the article I'm reading to be pushed down to the bottom of the screen by an expanding ad. I don't want my valuable Internet bandwidth adopted by an unwanted video playing in the background.
And I certainly don't want loud music or an annoying voice blaring out from my computer speakers simply because I happened to load a webpage that hosted a particular ad. They are all unwanted and unnecessary intrusions and earn more ill will than good for those advertisers.
On the contrary, I understand the need for advertisers to stand out from all of the background noise. The truth is that most users ignore banner ads unless something is going on to draw their attention. You have to do something, don't you?
You may do; maybe you don't. Making noise and creating animations just to be doing something probably isn't in your customers' needs. Loud noises and fancy animations in as well as themselves don't lend a lot of value; they're bells and whistles for the sake of having features.
If, however, you can employ these technologies for the benefit of potential customers, you may have something. Maybe you incorporate a live Twitter feed right into a display ad or use HTML technology to let customers take part in a poll or provide feedback on the new product or feature. You can employ Flash animation to let customers take a 360-degree product tour but only if they click to do this. You get the picture. Implement useful features that interested consumers can use and that don't automatically engage and annoy.
Then when it comes to banner advertising, which practices are acceptable and which should you avoid? To me, the guiding rule comes down to this: Don't interrupt the actual content of the page. You can try to draw attention away from what are the customer is reading but never ever obscure it.
First off, then, you should avoid rich media animations that prance about away from main ad frame. Nothing obscures the underlying content more than an animated figure dancing on top of it. It's more than just annoying it's rude.
Across the same lines, subdue the longing to employ automatically expanding ads, the kind that either expand along with underlying content or push that content further on the next paragraphs. I don't want an article to maintain moving up and down while I'm attempting to read it; celebrate me want to leave the page completely, which isn't good for either the advertiser or even the owner of the underlying page.
To that end, you need to avoid ads that be a musician without prompting. Loud, unexpected music is unquestionably intrusive. It's okay to allow music playback when a button is clicked, but don't force the 99% of page viewers who aren't interested to hear your musical choices. I'd also recommend against video playback that starts as soon as a page is loaded. This one is more about unnecessary bandwidth usage than it is interfering with the page viewing experience, but should be avoided; no person reading a page has a fast broadband connection.
These are my suggestions, in any case. Just remember, it's a fine line between being interesting and being annoying, anyone dealing with a drunk in a cocktail party let you know. Your job is to be engaging, not bothersome and definitely not so drunk on the technology that you force your message on people who just aren't interested.
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03142011
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