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Media Trend Watching: Annoying Banner Ads
Labels: 2006, Ad dollars, Advertising, Annoying, banner ads, IAB, Internet, Media Trend Watching, New Media, PwC, Revenue, Snark
More ad dollars keep going to the Internet.
Last month, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) announced that Internet advertising revenues for 2006 were estimated to be $16.8 billion, a 34% increase over the previous revenue record of $12.5 billion in 2005.
Globally, 2006's Q4 totaled just under $4.8 billion -- the highest quarter ever reported.
Nine short years ago, total spent Internet advertising in the 4th quarter (1997) was just $424 million...more than an eleven-fold increase.
These ad dollars are being spent on search marketing, paid search links, streaming video ads, contextual GoogleAds, email campaigns and many other forms. Among all choices, the most popular -- and often most annoying -- are banner ads. Sure, they deliver "eyeballs"...but many of them are just plain bad. That can't be great for ROI and certainly not for brand building strategies.
American may love streaming video...but the only people who like the banners ads next to the video probably are advertisers.
I found an article for "The Top 5 Most Annoying Banner Ads on the Internet". No doubt you've seen these banner ads while visiting your favorite sites. They're everywhere. While it may be difficult to ever narrow it down to only a Top 5 Most Annoying (given there are so many available), the logic is sound (although there's no scientific basis for their list).
Here's the selections from Cracked.com (thanks, Cracked!):
The Jointblog avoids banner ads (except to get snarky with them). Which banner ads annoy you? And which ones do you think work?
5) TBS Very Funny Ads. This is everything that's wrong with the modern media in one convenient image, for the busy modern person who needs to lose faith in humanity 'on the go'. A website dedicated to the commercials which prevent you from watching the programs on television....Worse, they're targeting the most annoying demographic on the planet: the "I only watch it for the ads" vacuum-headed smirkers.
4) Win a Free Thing. Banner ads used to promise instant free prizes, but even the dumbest internet surfer eventually realized that just maybe there weren't magical love-powered companies dedicated to giving free electronics to everyone on the planet...One thing all these ads have in common is legalese fine print which, like mobile-phone cancer and minesweepers wrist, is a disease of modern society.
3) Surveys. It's looking for people to complete marketing surveys, but only gets the kind who click on banner ads. The sort who can be distracted from what they're doing by the chance to fill out a form! People who need time and a roughwork sheet to answer the question "Is this object shiny?"
2) Emoticons. In the beginning, there were text smileys. And it was good. People who could spell transmitted thoughts around the globe, finding uses for neglected keys to generally acting like smart people. But with the advance of technology the ability to "use a computer" or "think with mouth closed" are no longer required to get online and banner ads are ever ready to harvest the new subliterate hordes.
And topping the list (drum roll, please...)
1) Juggling Animation (scaled down in size to minimize the annoyance). The makers of these eye-wrenching monstrosities have fixated on "Get their attention," forgetting that it's part of the larger sentence, "Get their attention so they want to buy our product/service, and ideally aren't motivated to track us down, cement our legs into the pavement, and slowly tear our heads off with a length of chain and a monster truck."
Update at 6pm: The Fark forum board is posting many comments about more bad banner ads, such as this comment:There are worse banner adds (sic) than those. The mortgage dancing people, animals, anything with that freaking mortgage company. Anything that flashes so that I have a seizure while I am trying to do something. Then there is this annoying windows one I ran into yesterday. I thought it was because of windows but it only happened on this one website..and it was about weight loss...IT DROVE ME NUTS. So yeah anything that resembles any kind of error window.
Tell us more...what other bad banners do you despise?
posted by Unknown @ Friday, April 06, 2007,
13 Comments:
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At 3:19 PM,
Crazy Raven Productions said...
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The partly disembodied floating people who cling to the bottom part of the browser window, follow you as you scroll, and talk loudly at you about what they're shilling until you hover over them to get the blasted "GO AWAY!!!" option. I despise these with the hate of a thousand suns.
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At 3:26 PM,
Chad said...
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Those line dancing, gay cowboy silhouettes piss me off, too.
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At 3:31 PM,
anon said...
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Three more to add to the list:
1) Banner ads with sound. Websurfing is usually a quiet experience for me (often done in a quiet office *ahem*.) So when I go to a typical page and have a random banner ad shout at me, "Congratulations, you've won an iPod!" - well, it's not good.
2) Banner ads with seizure-inducing flashing. Seriously, someone is going to go into an epileptic fit because of these things. And those of us who don't are still plagued by the distracting mess of cycling colors in our peripheral vision while we try to read the damn webpage.
3) Banner ads that jump out and blot out the text of the page. Banner ads should remain politely confined to the strip at the top or edge of the page. When they misbehave and jump in the way of my reading, it's a terrible irritation. And invariably, these intruding windows have teeny, tiny "X" buttons for closing them.
- David Stein -
At 3:42 PM,
J said...
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The only ads I've ever clicked on seriously were the Google ads banners. No flashy graphics, no obtrusive pop ups, just plain text links, all which are usually relevant to the content at hand. I mean really, even if I did want to take a Free IQ test, I probably wouldn't want to do it while I'm, say, looking at porn.
So for effective banner ads for me, the key things are relevance, subtlety, and whether or not the things they advertise are even somewhat useful (why would I want a giant red angry face for my instant messages anyway?). -
At 3:45 PM,
J said...
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Oh and to append what I just said, there are some cases where I will not purchase or look into something that I actually do want, simply because their ad was so obnoxious. I don't think I'm alone here -- the advertisers tend to forget about that. This is not just internet banner ads -- I stopped eating at MacDonald's when their "I'm Lovin' It" campaign came out because really, I can do without MacDonald's, and it's a small sacrifice to make to avoid contributing to the success of their stupid use of cliche phrases.
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At 3:52 PM,
J said...
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All right last comment. I think I've decided on the type of internet ad that annoys me on the most levels. The advertisements that pop up fake messages boxes or error messages with nonsensical things such as "You have 3 new messages", "Your computer is infected with a virus", or "Click here to block pop up ads forever".
1) They're intrusive and completely obnoxious.
2) The services they offer are, more often than not, available for cheaper and in a better form elsewhere (especially software related ones).
3) Some people are lost enough to actually take these things seriously and click on them. That fact bugs me the most. -
At 4:39 PM,
gbdfjsh said...
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The one thing you didin't mention about the talking emoticon ads are the ones with sound. Every new page or refresh on myspace gets you another "Omigosh! Noo Wayyy!". There was a petition circulating for a while to have them destroyed....
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At 5:01 PM,
Unknown said...
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A load of comments to the post on fark today...go to http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2723008 to read more.
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At 6:24 PM,
Unknown said...
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ads? what are ads? i haven't see an ad on teh intarwebnet in *years*, all thanks to http://www.ad-shield.com/ for IEx and http://adblockplus.org/en/ for FF
anyone still "suffering" from ads also probably has problems with viruses, and trojans, and spyware, etc
i have ZERO sympathy for them, though i will happily charge them a small fee to clean up their pc ;)
oh, and one other thing
it's not 'adds', you retards
you're not 'adding' anything -
At 6:59 PM,
bjy said...
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Banner ads that launch their websites page in a new window just by mouse over. Yahoo Hotjobs has banner ads all over the place that do this, and it is rediculous.
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At 7:17 PM,
hijakk said...
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If there is sound in your ad, or your page, you will be feasted upon by wild pygmy goats.
That is all. -
At 10:08 PM,
MurrayHurps said...
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Bias warning: I work on an ad-blocking program for a living.
You have to wonder what the total cost of annoying advertising is.
If we assume the that:
- A person's time is worth whatever they are paid by their employer.
- The average time spent distracted by a bright, bouncing advert is half a second.
- The average person's pay per year is $7,030 (source).
- The average hours worked per year is 1,777 (source).
Then the average cost in lost time, per advert impression is $0.000549.
If we assume a CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions) of $0.50, then for every $1000 spent by an advertiser pushing an annoying ad they cost uninterested viewers $1098 in lost time.
Not all advertising is that distracting, but if we also assume that:
- 0.5% of advert spending is on particularly distracting ones.
- Yearly advertising spending of $19.5 billion (source).
Then the total cost to people worldwide is $107 million, per year.
This number is extremely rough, but should be food for thought. If you aren't already using an ad blocker, give mine a try. -
At 12:01 AM,
A Kermode Bear said...
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Or, instead of paying $24.95, they can give free alternatives a try instead.
