Did you think pop-up ads, interstitials (ads that delay your visit to a web page), and superstitials (ads that delay your visit to the next web page as you leave the one putting up the ad) were tried, proven faulty and discarded? Think again.
"Rudely interrupted? Hey, we do that with radio, we do that with any serially served medium... It's accepted in other media because they grew up with it." Just because the Internet can involve serial mutlimedia does not make it a serially served medium. Even as Internet multimedia technology diverges from the textual documents we know and love, text is not going away. Certainly neither is the need for responsiveness in interactivity. Delay ads are delays in what is intuitively a smooth interactive experience.
Once again at the risk of promoting the company I work for, I very much like the Walt Disney Internet Group's new "Big Impression" strategy, exemplified by Movies.com, ESPN.com, the new ABCNews.com redesign, and the new redesign of Wall of Sound. A television-size-ratio'd rectange appears near the top of the site, always in the same location, and can contain streamed animation or interactive elements. The unique size catches your attention, and the allowance of full Fkash-enabled animations provide more space to have advertising people will want to see. Particularly cool is how, on many of the sites mentioned, the box contains animated content as well as advertising, essentially a little attention-grabbing serially served TV on the web site. Note that it's not just the novelty of the size or position of the ad that makes it eye-catching, but the content of the ad itself.
Most importantly, it demands nothing of the user. TV and radio are non-interactive, banner ads are unintrusive, so is that ad box. Pop-ups, interstitials and superstitials demand a response to continue-- and yes, that includes even a 5 second interstitial, as I have to explicitly close it to make my intuitively instantaneous click as quick as possible. If I were to walk into a bookstore and a billboard dropped from the ceiling, blocking my path until I pushed it out of my way, I'd be pissed, even if it promised to disappear in five seconds.
Oh by the way, when you go to a software download site, click on the Download link, and get a page with an ad that says your download is being "prepared" or something like that, you're being screwed out of five seconds of your life. You think it's "preparing," but it's actually waiting for you to read the ad. OK, I really don't mind this that much, since the download is intended to take a while anyway. But advertisers will lie to you in this way to keep you from getting angry when you have every right to do so. Ever try to "unsubscribe" from a piece of spam, only to find that their server is "down for maintenance"? Or worse, ever receive a piece of spam that claims to be a newsletter you subscribed to, so it's not their fault that they're violating your inbox?
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it infuriates me to hear ad industry schmucks say, "Everybody stop complaining, we're experimenting with new forms of advertising, and we'll see what works and what doesn't," when our complaints are sole sign that their experiments are failing. What's worse is that that isn't exactly true: sales make up the bottom line, and if someone out there is responding positively to the ad, retailers think that means their ad is cost-effective-- but the ad, especially in the case of email spam, cost almost nothing to produce or place, so it's pretty much always cost-effective.
As the popular free browsers inevitably build in special ad display technology (imagine interstitials between every site you visit, independent of the sites you're visiting, served by AOL-Time-Warner or Microsoft directly), the for-cost-no-ad browsers still won't be able to make enough money to compete, and the no-cost-no-ad options (such as GNU-ish browsers) simply won't be able to keep up with technology that will eventually have real development costs. Not only that, but imagine the network of corporate alliances that would prevent no-ad browsers from using the latest multimedia technology. (*cough*)
OK, I'm done for now. Am I a rant blog yet?
