I have been poking around the Internet for going on 20 years now. In the beginning we had little or no advertising. We also had very basic user interface design. We all lived in the world of green screens. This, of course, changed when HTML and HTTP came around. It brought about some of the best and worst user interface issues ever. It also started the online advertising industry. In all of this time I have seen large volumes of time devoted by site owners to getting the site’s user interface just right. I see very little of this going on in the advertising world.
I think now is the perfect time to make a change with how advertising works on the Internet. For way too long we have relied on our ability to use often annoying and deceptive techniques to get people to follow our ads. First flashing pictures (euphemism for “seizure inducing ads”), then fake system messages, followed by pop-ups, pop-unders…. and the list goes on. All of these were attempts to draw users attention away from what they originally came to the site for. In time the users became wiser about these ad techniques and grew tone deaf to them. And often a secondary result of becoming downright hostile towards the advertisers.
I work mainly in Video Advertising, and have begun to see the same thing happen in this industry as well. Pre-roll video blocks the view of the “MAIN” content, and way too often has NO relevancy to the content. Overlay ads that are often blocking key elements of the video, and again even though these are mostly text ads, the relevancy is horrible…. For example if I see any more Dentist text ads I will scream. Mid-roll ads I think are ok, but only for long content, and should happen like in real TV as a dramatic pause to the content. But there is so much more that could be done.
Relevancy – It really is not that difficult to only play relevant inventories. This is an issue right now because of lack of ad inventories but I think the ad agencies have to take some of the blame here. They have been LAZY… They build a single campaign for a single format. The are frequently building promo micro sites, and then using simple banner and flash ads to promote them. I would suggest that the model would be better if they built a holistic campaign. Where they could reach multiple separate “types” of users.
Now to the crux of my article – User Interface.
In the past, ads would be simple banners and the goal was to get someone to follow the link. Today that is just not enough. The viewer of advertisements need to know more before they will even decide to invest time to go to the intended site. In addition, the way users are wanting to interact with Advertisers has changed. Advertising has always been a passive medium. Slap up a banner or a TV spot, or a print ad, and someone will see it… Today the users are wanting to actively engage with the things they are interested in. So we have all sorts of one-off ads being developed. Widgets, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, banner Ads, Video Ads, vanity sites, promo sites, micro-sites, email campaigns. So an Ideal Ad would allow potential customers to interact with many of these at once. While possibly gaining more insight in real time to what the advertiser does.
To achieve this you need effective User Interface Design. Over the next few weeks I will write about the engagement ad platform we are currently rolling out, and how we are dealing with many of these User Interface questions. I also hope to be able to give some preliminary numbers from the effectiveness of these ads.
Tags: Advertising, Advertising Design, Business, Design, online video advertising, User Interface, Video, Video Advertising
