Let’s Clarify.
At no point did I say, “DOWN WITH ADVERTISING, TEH INTERNETS SHOULD BE TEH ALL FREE!”
My point is that banner / display / interruptive / pop-up / whatever ads are not a very effective way to convey a brand message in this day and age. And certainly making them LARGER and MORE intrusive is not going to change that.
Other things that aren’t going to change that: gimmicky shit like making the banner on the side that no one looks at interact with the banner on the top that no one looks at. Nor making a giant animated ipod jump down from the top of the page and shake the nav bar. Nor making the banner ads that no one looks at into full-motion video ads that on one looks at.
This type of advertising — ALL OF IT — is akin to having obnoxious billboards slapped across every open space in your neighborhood. I don’t care if your ad is a flashing gif or a multimillion dollar animated piece by TBWA, it is, effecitvely, an obnoxious billboard that announces its presence with all the elegance of used car salesman.
There’s got to be a better way to do this, that’s what I’m saying. Online advertising (in these instances) is effectively just relying on the SAME idea for “advertising on the internet” that was developed more than 10 years ago. An ad box that no one wants or looks at is a box that no one wants or looks at, whether it’s 30px x 30px or 9000px by 20000px.
I’m saying, instead of these online advertising czars thinking “how should we change these ‘ad boxes’”, perhaps everyone might be better served by thinking in terms of “let’s start from scratch and determine what, exactly, does ‘advertising’ mean in light of today’s society, technology, and market?” and working on something NEW from there.
Just because it works in print (“slap an ad next to that editorial!”) doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it online. And just because something is measurable (“look, your ad got 5,600,987 impressions with 20 clickthrus!”) doesn’t mean it’s GOOD or EFFECTIVE. All it means is its “measurable.”
While I am in no way shape or form anything close to an expert on this subject, and while I also really really hate obnoxious web ads just like everyone else, this seems like it’s more of a criticism of advertising in general, not advertising on the web. Advertising on the internet hasn’t changed in the past ten years? Well, when was the last time print advertising made an evolutionary leap forward? No matter how creative and clever, a full page ad is still a full page ad. Sure, they went from being text heavy to image heavy, and helvetica came along, but it’s ink on paper. Even though I’m still waiting for scratch-n-sniff ads to become cool, the medium has its limits. And just like web ads, print ads are merely ‘measurable’. Unlike web ads, they are far less intrusive, which makes reading the paper far more pleasant than reading the laptop, but only because I literally never pay attention to a single ad that I see in the paper. Ever.
While the internet is an amazing place and things you can do on it have progressed beyond our wildest imaginations over the past ten years, when it boils down to it you’re just looking at a screen. When you watch video on the screen, the ads tend to mimic or directly emulate TV ads — for obvious reasons. When you read on it, the ads tend to mimic print.
The minor leaps forward in web advertising like bigger ads, content disguised as ads and crazy iPod ads have not been effective. Everyone can agree on that. But is there really a better way that everyone in the world hasn’t been able to think of yet? Maybe. Probably. Hopefully.
But maybe it is not the way we advertise on the web that has to change, but how the effectiveness is measured that has to change. Full page ads in the New York Times cost a lot of money, and the Times doesn’t only get paid when someone clips a coupon and brings it into Bloomingdales.
Sorry if this read like the first chapter from the Captain Obvious guide to internet advertising!
