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Ad
Design of Comic Proportions
Last month I wrote about what happens when online advertising agencies
don’t understand how to design ads for an interactive environment.
This month, I’m writing about what’s wrong with the way we measure
ad success on the web, and how that’s leading to bad ad design of
comic proportions.
Since my last column, New
York Times Digital announced that it would support CNET’s
effort to create new online advertising formats, and would accept
the new ads on NYTimes.com
beginning in Q2 of this year (2001). The full
press release is available online.
The new ads take the form of very large (approximately 374 x 315
pixels), interactive blocks placed directly in the middle of the
content page. They’re actually squareish Flash movies that allow
the user to interact with the ad, just like you would interact with
an entire Flash web site. At first glance, they look like illustrations
for the article they’re shoehorned into. CNET’s News.com is already
using this format, and you can see examples
there.
374 x 315 pixels is an astoundingly large amount of screen real
estate to give over to an ad, given the current site design standard
of 800 x 600. Further, these ads masquerade as content, looking
innocently like part of the article you’re reading until you try
to find meaning in them.
According to Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital, the
rationale behind the move to these larger, more interactive ads
is to generate greater profits by giving advertisers "more
effective positions." He continues that "we all need to
leverage the interactive nature of the Web better." Unfortunately,
these ads won’t be any more effective at delivering users than banners
and bricks. Users will ignore them in equally large numbers.
The Internet is not Direct Response
The basic problem with the move to these ads is that it is motivated
by the continued acceptance of the flawed way by which online advertising
is deemed effective. The current thinking has it that the Internet
is a direct-response medium. Ad effectiveness is measured accordingly
- by counting clicks directly on the ad.
In fact, the Internet is a delayed-response medium. Often a user
will take note of an ad but not click on it, sometimes going directly
to the destination site later. Why does this happen? Because web
users are on a mission, and the ads do not represent information
relevant to that mission. Most ads are placed at the beginning or
middle of the user’s mission (or task), where they’re least likely
to be acted upon. Ads are most effective when placed at the end
of the user’s task - when they’re done doing what they came to the
site to do, or at least done with a particular page. This is why
search-phrase driven ads placed on search results pages are so much
more effective-and get more click-throughs-than ads placed willy-nilly.
They’re relevant and they appear at a time when the user is particularly
receptive.
Since users aren’t, for the most part, willing to play along with
the idea that the web is a direct-response medium, it follows that
measuring online ad effectiveness by direct-response measures is
flawed. We don’t measure out-of-home ad effectiveness by how many
people stop what they’re doing and reach for their cell phone when
they view them. So why should we measure online ads by how many
people stop what they’re doing to leave the site and do something
entirely different? It doesn’t make sense. We should be measuring
effectiveness by more traditional methods, focusing on impressions
made and the relevance of the ad to the user’s needs.
Understanding the Problem
The fact that the new ads are interactive just means that they’ll
cost more to produce. Most users have already been trained that
advertisers will stop at nothing to get them to click on their banner
(and be taken to another site), even going as far as to trick the
user by designing the ad to look interactive when it really isn’t.
Once tricked, most users aren’t likely to try to interact with an
ad again. Ads just aren’t that compelling. Even if CNET and New
York Times Digital promise never to allow ads that stoop to that
that level, other sites will. Soon enough, users will learn not
to try to interact with the big square ads.
Clearly, CNET, and New York Times Digital understand that something
is wrong with the state of online advertising. But they’ve gone
in exactly the wrong direction in their attempt to fix the problem.
They’ve taken something that doesn’t work by current measures and
made it bigger-the online equivalent of speaking loudly and slowly
to people whose language you do not speak.
Even if users do interact with the ads, it’s highly unlikely that
they will actually click out of the site. There’s no need to now,
as you can get all the info you want right in the ad. That’s a good
thing when you think about the fact that you got your brand in front
of the user, but our click-through measures don’t allow for that.
In the end, I predict that these ads will actually drive revenues
down as users flock to sites that don’t waste their time filling
half a screen with ads that aren’t relevant to the task at hand.
They should be abandoned as quickly as they were embraced.
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