Online Creative Ad Design Throws In the Towel

If you haven’t yet noticed the newest twist in what I call “in your face” online advertising:

Excerpted from Story published New York Times on Tuesday, August 22, 2017

you soon will. Inserting “high intensity” banner ads directly within the text flow of online stories is just the latest effort to stimulate our interest in plain old banner ad technology fresh out of the late 1990s.

If you read your stories on an iPhone, iPad or Android equivalent, you’ll get an interactive “push”. Start reading the story and then lose your place. The app, or web page opens the text flow and inserts this less than captivating content for you — no click required.

First: the content is stale and completely devoid of any novel creative touch. Second: someone (not sure who) made a decision to inflict banners on us — wanted or not. So we are talking about online mind assault, without fear of consequences.

What’s the conclusion? It’s hard to miss recognizing a couple of things from this effort: 1) Online “credible” news publishers (think New York Times, Wall Street Journal & more) are still not willing to dive into a pure subscription model for readers. They’ve approved this brute force approach to make readers mentally eat ads. Despite monthly subscription fees they are still, apparently, starving for cash. 2) The creative wing of the online advertising business is completely out of gas. They can’t dream up new and novel ways to promote goods. So they concocted a process to shove old creative back into our faces. NOT GOOD.

This kind of irritating and offensive manipulation of the relationship between online publishers and their readers is the stuff ad blocker heaven is made of.

Advertisers: RE-THINK your online product promotion strategies. Online Publishers: ask your subscribers if they can take a rate increase to really go ad-free. Ad Creatives: Do something!

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Written by

32 years non stop experience marketing & selling IT products to enterprise business. MA in English. Technical Writer. MARCOM & PR writer. Product Mktng.

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