Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

detente

I love the way this New York Times story about the rise of text ads sets the scene:

Five years ago, Web advertisers were engaged in an ever-escalating competition to grab our attention. Monkeys that asked to be punched, pop-ups that spawned still more pop-ups, strobe effects that imparted temporary blindness - these were legal forms of assault. The most brazen advertiser of all, hands down, was X10, a little company hawking security cameras, whose ubiquitous “pop under” ads were the nasty surprise discovered only when you closed a browser window in preparation for doing something else.

Today, Web advertisers by and large have put down their weapons and sworn off violence. They use indoor voices now. This is a remarkable change.

Thank you, Google.

(“How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web” - 11/20/05)

I remember those awful X10 ads. For me, at least, their ubiquity only bred contempt. Text ads like the ones served by Google and Yahoo’s Overture are much more well-mannered — although I’m developing a certain “banner blindness” to those kinds of ads as well, as they rarely seem to be advertising anything that would interest me.

That said, I don’t have a knee-jerk, “kill it now!” reaction to text ads, as I generally do any ad that, say, spawns a new window or obscures the contents of the page. I don’t understand how intrusive advertising that inspires user rage can be at all successful. Sure, your product is pretty likely to be remembered — but don’t those intrusive ads leave users with a negative impression?

(Thanks to Rob for the link.)