I remember when I realized I'd become immune to banner ads.
I had to sign up for a college related thing on a website once and I just could not see that sign up button. They made it a flashing advertisement sized block right above another article, with big letters "SIGN UP HERE". A friend sent me the link and I literally spent 5 minutes trying to find it in navigation bars and other links in the article. My friend had to send me a screenshot of his screen with a big red arrow pointing to the sign up block before I noticed it. I now use Adblock but for the times that it doesn't work, my mental Adblock seems to always help me out as well ( Especially for those sneaky ads mixed in between real articles ).
I found it amusing that an article on this topic has a newsletter signup dialog appear immediately upon scrolling down. I'm sure the effectiveness of such a technique follows the same kind of curve as the other techniques discussed in the article.
Commenting for this exact reason. If not for this article pointing out this behaviour I'd have never noticed that I automatically closed it off. Didn't even read what it wanted me to do
No doubt the next iteration is to change the functionality so that the 'x' does something other than close the window, but we'll all learn to avoid that too
If it's not immediately apparent to me how to close it I get out dev tools and start slapping "display: none;" on things. If that takes more than 30 seconds I just give up and close the tab...
I wanted to say exactly this. The re-discovered holy grail of newsletters, drip email and popups will decline pretty soon.
The usual argument pro drip-emails is: Emails will sit right there in your inbox, next to important other stuff. Now, since everybody does it, it sits right next to a thousand other newsletters. Just like with RSS readers a couple years ago.
Also as amusing, until I looked at the heat graphs, I didn't notice the tiny AppSumo advertisement in the right hand margin. Chen is right, we are pattern recognition machines. I've literally taught myself to ignore ads!
It's a marketing technique that currently enjoys good conversion. What I'm thankful for is that it did not pop up over the content upon pageload. Worst thing ever.
"When HotWired showed banner ads for the first time in history, people clicked just to check out the experience. Same for being the first web product to email people invites to a website – it works for a while, until your customers get used to the effect, and start ignoring it."
Well, duh, people tend to avoid unrewarding experiences. And advertisement is basically the pursuit of pushing unrewarding experiences onto people. Of course once they are onto you they won't fall for the tricks again. People have just become much, much better at filtering now (both mentally and digitally).
I doubt we will see the sidebar ads disappear very soon though. Even though our eyes do not focus on the ad we are still aware that the ad is there. There are many studies concerning subliminal media being successful. In fact Derren Brown made a career out of it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/6232801...
We'll yeah, brand recognition/awareness, many companies are willing pay a lot of money just to display some logo to a large audience.
Just think stadium sideline advertising.
We all have our heads filled with company/product logos, slogans, jingles, etc. all this useless junk that just keeps piling on and on throughout our life, insidiously altering our behavior.
Everything today, TV, Radio, Internet, Newspapers, public/private space, Clothing, ... also doubles as an advertisement delivery pipeline.
I can't imagine using the internet without an ad-blocker anymore, it's already such a different experience.
All advertising today is arbitrage by definition -leveraging a discrepancy between the value of those eyeballs and the cost to attract them. All arbitrage will eventually be corrected by the market.
This is why there is such a strong push to content marketing, which is essentially the brands becoming media companies.
This is also why native ad units (not just advertorials but any ad unit that Is the atomic consumption unit of the site like news feed ads, AdWords ads, etc...) Work much better than display, because they are value add and are essentially the flip side of content marketing.
I think the future, sustainable strategies will be user experiences that naturally progress into buying. (I.e. a content site selling premium content or hosting a conference or a Saas product using a freemium model.)
Maybe ads are called ads because they should be adding value.
If I am driving near my home, it will likely be to a business that I decided to patronize before I even left home. Those in-town billboards are thus only good for subconscious name recognition. I'm not going to hire an ambulance-chaser lawyer unless I need one, but if I do, there are two in particular that saturate the local ads around here, including the billboards. If you're in that sort of business, you really do need to put your name on every space you can buy.
On the highway, most of the billboard ads are for businesses positioned near the highway.
I don't think highway billboards and in-town billboards are realistically in the same advertising market, even if they have similar form factors.
Clever and eye-grabbing is strictly for in-town boards. The same people will see this message multiple times, perhaps even twice a day.
Highway billboards have to be simple and informative, and highly relevant to travelers. People may only see these once, ever.
When I'm on the highway, I won't even look at billboards unless one of the following applies:
- need food
- need gas
- need a toilet
And those functions are increasingly being replaced by GPS navigators with preloaded points of interest and by smartphones' interactive map applications.
There's a bunch of issues with this post. He points out AT&T's one ad had a 78% CTR, and then labels HotWired's entire site CTR at 78% CTR (he assumes that they didn't have other ads after ATT and that all their ads have a 78% CTR)
And then he compares it to the FB CTR of 0.05%
0.05% is not accurate. It's likely what you'll hit if you have no idea what you're doing, or just don't care because you're an agency advertising a clueless big brand. But it's not that hard to hit a 1-3% CTR on FB now -- especially with the newsfeed ads. Even using standard IAB display it's not too difficult to hit a 1-2% CTR.
Last, the 78% CTR is suspect. I wouldn't just believe it blindly. It does make sense that it would be high (I.e. 20-30%) given that people weren't used to banner ads at the time. Additionally, it's a Trick to Click ad that would never be Approved today. And I've even tried out of curiosity, and it was immediately slapped by reviewers ("I bet you can't click your mouse right here")
"But it's not that hard to hit a 1-3% CTR on FB now -- especially with the newsfeed ads."
Facebook introduced newsfeed ads in 2012, and this article might (?) date from as far back as 2011, going by the statistics and dates cited in it. I might be wrong about that, but I do know it's an older article. Andrew doesn't date these blog posts, but I remember reading this article years ago.
Ok, good catch. :) I'll own up to the embarrassment I deserve right now.
Even still, the point stands: the article was published before newsfeed ads debuted (in June '12), and certainly before their use became commonplace enough to establish benchmark CTRs.
A single tap does not require much of the patience.
Edit: ok, I will expand a bit. At least on iOS an app using notifications asks for the permission. So a single tap is all it needs to get zero notifications.
Even if one allows notifications first it only takes going to settings->notifications and toggling a single switch there.
FYI, you can do the same in Android. Hold on the notification, click "App Info", untick "Show Notifications". Or go to settings, "Applications", select the app, untick "Show Notifications".
I had to sign up for a college related thing on a website once and I just could not see that sign up button. They made it a flashing advertisement sized block right above another article, with big letters "SIGN UP HERE". A friend sent me the link and I literally spent 5 minutes trying to find it in navigation bars and other links in the article. My friend had to send me a screenshot of his screen with a big red arrow pointing to the sign up block before I noticed it. I now use Adblock but for the times that it doesn't work, my mental Adblock seems to always help me out as well ( Especially for those sneaky ads mixed in between real articles ).