A collection of stuff

Via The Business Insider I found out that a group of 27 Huge Publishers are getting together to get rid of the ad banner and instead come up with more intrusive and obstructive advertising that they hope visitors will find hard to ignore. I am pretty sure that advertisers don’t like the fact that users have learned to easily ignore the ads on a website, so they imagine that by making the ads much larger and impossible to move aside the users will be forced to watch them and will take action. Oh, I’m sure they’ll take action: ad blockers will become more popular than ever.

This is the problem with advertising right now: traditional advertisers just can’t understand the medium, they just can’t, it’s not in their blood. They believe that dominating the visual field of the user is the key to get them buyers. That didn’t even work with TV any more, commercial breaks are universally used to go to the washroom, get a beer, or read a couple of notes from the newspaper. People didn’t look at 30′ ads on TV, what makes them think they will on their computer? Specially when they have so many ways to get at the content they want, from rss feeds to aggregators to third parties like Facebook posts.

Advertisers, publishers and visitors hate the ad banner, yes. But not for the same reasons. Visitors won’t love bigger obtrusive ads. They will learn to ignore them and hate them. And guess what? They will learn to ignore and hate your brand as well.

So, what can you do as a brand manager, advertiser or publisher? Well, if you are an advertiser, forget everything you know that you think can be applied to this new medium. Go sell pencils in a corner or something more at your level. For the rest of you, there may still be hope. Look, visitors don’t like it when they get interrupted, but they like it when you give them more of what they are looking for, more of what they came to get. So, sponsor related links even if they are not about your stuff, put your brand there, not big but small in a good spot. Let visitors know that your attitude is not “here’s what you should do” but “what do you want me to do?”.

That will get you into the top of mind of visitors as a brand that helps and promotes, not one that obstructs and interrupts. Repetition and constancy are key here. Now, to promote a particular product or get users to perform a desired action, you have a very clear, concise and quick message: “Hey, did you hear about the new Ford F-150?” and provide an option to either go to a site right away or to store their information in their bookmarking or social networking site for later perusal. That’s the equivalent of giving them the brochure after you’ve helped them take their grocery bags to the car.

Sure, you can keep wasting your money on trying to find a way to fit traditional advertising into new media, might find a square peg for a round hole while you’re at it; or you may want to be bold, helpful and engaging for a change. It’s up to you.

Oh, by the way, no need to thank me for the free advice, I just hate ad banners as much as any one else.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter @Malarkey sent a very curious message about this error message:

“The current browser is either too old or too modern”

So, the calendar can’t be used because the javascript that’s supposed to handle it was made for the Netscape Navigator browser which I imagine no one thought would ever ever go away. Unfortunately it went away in March 2008, after years of almost nil market share. Someone must have thought that people actually bothered to install the gazillions CDs that AOL polluted the world with for about a decade.

Unfortunately that was not the case and hardly anyone has used Navigator since 2002, and so what could have been seen as a bold move by the developers betting their all on the success of one single browser now survives solely as a curious error message that I think could also be a haiku.

On the other hand it could be that the error message should be “The developers of this site are either too stupid or too lazy.”

So, kids, let this be a lesson to you: don’t develop for a single browser, make sure your code degrades gracefully and, if you are the website owner, check your websites more often than once every five years, preferably with what people would most likely be using to see it.