Monday, September 18, 2006

What's Worse Than An Animated Gif Banner Ad?

The SitePal animated talking character skyscraper ads Technorati has been running for the past few weeks. I know Barry is a huge fan of these ads and the company in general (if they built me a site I might think a tad differently) but they are honestly the most annoying ads I've ever seen and nothing makes me want to install GreaseMonkey more than the SitePal ads. SitePal is one of those companies you either love or hate and you don't have to guess which side of the fence I'm on.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 10:11 AM
Permanent Link: What's Worse Than An Animated Gif Banner Ad? | Comments (6)

(6) Comments on What's Worse Than An Animated Gif Banner Ad?

It is about implementation. The user must be in control. What you are annoyed about is that if you simply mouse over the ad at Technorati, it automatically starts talking to you. If you clicked on it, that would be a good implementation that would not annoy you as much -- mouse over is a bit too much...

Comments by Barry Schwartz : Monday, September 18, 2006 at 11:06 AM

Thanks for your feedback, all of us at Technorati appreciate hearing how we can improve our site experience. We received several pro & con Sitepal ad comments and have decided to swap out the mouse over audio initiation creative for audio on the click only ads. We will continue to test new ad types and placements to deliver value to our advertising clients, but creating a superior site experience will always be our North Star.

Comments by Mike Linton : Monday, September 18, 2006 at 01:28 PM

Mike, it's 2006 - and you guys look like Altavista about six years ago...

Comments by Massimo Moruzzi : Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 02:59 AM

Google toolbar and Firefox Google search O_o

Comments by Stevil : Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 10:57 AM

I’m Yujin Sohn from SitePal Marketing. Please let me sincerely (and belatedly) apologize if our speaking ads on Technorati made your online experience unpleasant. As Mike from Technorati said in his comment, our ads are designed to speak only when a user rolls over to initiate the audio. However, a technical bug we experienced a couple of weeks ago caused the banners to speak on-load against our intention. On finding this, we changed all banners running on Technorati to audio-on-click, which doesn’t speak until the user clicks on it. We also tightened the ad frequency cap, limiting the number of times a unique user is exposed to our banners a day. Our goal is enhance the user’s online experience and we are truly sorry when we fall short of that goal.

We genuinely appreciate your direct feedback about our ads, and we would be very interested in hearing your feedback about our product. To this end, we would like to offer you a SitePal custom speaking character to try out on your blog or website. We will follow this post up with an email. Again, thank you for your feedback, and we apologize again for the inconvenience our ads may have caused you.

Comments by Yujin Sohn : Tuesday, September 26, 2006 at 11:45 AM

PLEASE PUT MORE SITEPAL ADS ON YOUR WEBSITE I love them!!!!!

Comments by Livingstone : Saturday, April 19, 2008 at 08:57 PM

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