Re: Advertising and ad technology

From: Sean Dillon <sean_at_telegraph.co.uk>
Date: Tue 08 Oct 2002 08:41:00 -0500

"Maty Matyszak" <matyszak_at_ntlworld.com> wrote:

> I've been lurking this board for a while now, and would like to
> find the opinion of its users on a discussion I have just had with
> a student. This student commented that on the sites she uses almost
> all the
> flash/activeX/javascript presents is advertising. Most of the
> content she needs is static html. By browsing with all scripting
> turned off she gets what she wants with almost no intrusive
> advertising.
>
> I've just tried it, and you know, she's right. If this catches on,
> the implications could be interesting ...


Except that any Admaster/traffic person worth their salt would
ensure that they picked up on this and served an ad your
crippled browser _could_ see.

A rich media adtag (lets say Doubleclick), would comprise the
following:

<IFRAME... >
  <SCRIPT... >
  </SCRIPT>
 <NOSCRIPT>
  <A HREF...>
  <IMG SRC...></A>
 <NOSCRIPT>
<IFRAME>

Rich media code is delivered through the Iframe/Script tag.

Basically the IFRAME will be interpreted by IE and you'll be
able to serve rich media into that space.

For Netscape or other browsers not supporting Iframes, the
script tag is interpreted.


For those people who think they can get around things by turning off
Javascript the NOSCRIPT tag will then show them a static ad instead.

Of course this doesn't work with some ads (Eyeblaster, Unicast
etc...)
or ads that specifically require JavaScript enabled.

But you can see that given a Flash banner, even if the user had
disabled javascript you could still deliver a gif image instead.

The most effective method I have found for blocking ads is
redirecting adserver calls by pointing an adserver url to
127.0.0.1 in your .hosts file, but this means having to keep
an up-to-date version of the most widely used
adserver URLs and IP addresses.


To be frank, P3P and incorrectly configured browsers poses many
more worries than this.


Se_n


Se_n Dillon
Traffic Manager
www.telegraph.co.uk

e: sean_at_telegraph.co.uk
t: 020-7531-3236
f: 020-7538-7236




Received on Tue Oct 08 2002 - 08:41:00 CDT