The Underscore Archives

On Nov 15, 2007 11:35 AM, Tim Beadle <tim.beadle at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> When everybody is shouting, the best way to be heard is to whisper.
> cf. The Deck ads: small and unobtrusive but useful and relevant.
>

In other words, *mindful of their context*.

To me, that's the key to this - advertising on the web to date has
tried to copy the old style of advertising from newspapers and
magazines, which is silly. Advertisers online face completely
different circumstances and should change their thinking accordingly.

Let me explain what I mean.

Print media is - has always been - built this way: the advertisers get
*first priority* over the *physical space* available in the newspaper.
The ads get booked in advance. *Then* the copy from the journalists
gets fitted *around* them.

(I can remember being in a newsroom in the early 90s where they were
only just introducing a Mac-based layout system. The subs on the
layout desk weren't used to it, so they continued to do their layouts
manually - with paper and glue and marker pens! - for some time after
the Mac system was brought in.)

Print ads needed to be BOLD to attract the reader's attention. Hence
adventures with type, images, photography, colour, wrap-arounds,
promotional gifts etc.

Online media *does not face the same constraints*. There is no limit
of physical space; a web site can be as big as you want it to be, for
as-near-to-nothing-as-makes-no-difference.

So it follows that online ads *don't need to have first priority* anymore.

And that's what we've seen, by and large - thanks to usability
campaigners, these days online it tends to be the *words* that get
first priority, and the adverts have to fit in around them. If they
all try the BOLD approach, they're all doomed, because they drown each
other out and piss off the users.

It's the *reverse* of how things used to be in newspapers.

The best ads - the ones that people don't object to - are the ones
that grant the reader some degree of intelligence; the ones that are
useful and relevant and *mindful of their context*.

Which is why Deck ads - and to an extent, Gmail ads - don't bother
people at all; but massive interstitials do.

G