Re: Why online advertising sucks

From: Adrian Funnell <afunnell_at_gobeyond.com>
Date: Tue 20 Mar 2001 05:16:35 -0600

There was a lot of uninformed thinking in the laundry list
submission that started this post. However, I would like
to speak to this point. Yes, clutter is a bad thing, and
the more ads on the page, the lower your response rate is
going to be. When I did media buying for Beyond
Interactive, I did my best to avoid cluttered placements.
If you must buy in a cluttered publication, I would suggest
a text placement as people tune out all the flashing,
tweaking, buttons and banners.

BTW, sites like ZDNet and the Industry Standard are coated
with ads, because these sites sell out their entire
inventory! Supply Vs. Demand. If you want my advice start
a tech news publication, this is the only place next to
keywords that is a sellers' market for online advertising.
Sites not selling out their inventory and covering their
pages with ads is a bad idea as you will subtract from the
performance of your solid advertising partners and they
will not renew buys.

I think this discussion of clutter touches on a larger
issue though, and that is where the industry is going.
Banner and button advertising is losing its effectiveness
and people are starting to move to larger more intrusive
creative executions (i.e.. Cnet, New IAB Standards). This
is necessary from a publisher standpoint where the revenue
is extremely tight right now and in order to keep the
content FREE and not move to a subscription model, we need
to find more effective (and yes intrusive) ways to reach
our audience.

While I understand the need for standards, there is so much
that can be done with the interactive power of the medium
and I hope that we turn this problem into an opportunity
to push the limits in terms of what we can do in this
space. Advertisers, are Banners and Buttons not doing it
for you? Publishers, are your clients not renewing due to
"poor performance?" There is all kinds of stuff that can
be done with Flash and DHTML that is not being utilized.
Check out http://www.ad4ever.com and you'll see what I
mean. Your creative team will love you too!

Adrian.

Adrian Funnell| Account Planner
beyond interactive | digital advertising and media
specialists
71 Stevenson, Suite 1125 | San Francisco | CA 94105 | USA
p415.343.5342| f 415.343.5301
afunnell@gobeyond.com | http://www.gobeyond.com/



Received on Tue Mar 20 2001 - 05:16:35 CST