1st
I cannot believe how utterly and completely clueless the online advertising industry people are. God, would you please bring down a Wall Street -style crash on them so we can finally clear out all this bullshit and start rebuilding this online ad stuff from the ground up?
There are a few issues with this TechCrunch mock-up:
A) The Pushdown actually pushes the content at the top of the page down rather than covering it up. It then resolves to a smaller size (970x45) and the content is moved back up to fill in. More intrusive than previous IAB-standard sizes yes, but publishers can independently determine how long the pushdown is pushed down.
B) XXL Box is ostensibly more intrusive than standard IAB placements, but then again publishers can determine how it’s deployed. My guess is most top-tier pubs will require that this unit expands on user initiation (sometimes on rollover, sometimes on a click). At CBS Interactive, we always require Rich Media executions to be user-initiated via click. We do this because we know most people hate overtly interruptive ad-executions, but they feel better about it when they expand the ad by clicking on the ad unit rather than randomly rolling over it or doing nothing at all.
C) Probably most important is that naturally big, glaring yellow boxes with enormous red text plastered all over TechCrunch are pretty clearly incongruous. It’s easy to rip into these ad sizes when the example used is outrageously garish and incorrectly deployed.
I’m not saying these new OPA units are necessarily the answer, but when you neglect to mention relevant details regarding how they’ll be deployed you’re missing the point. Online publishers are trying to find formats that appeal to advertisers and command pricing premiums. I think if the creative is contextually relevant and well done (read: like pretty much any of Apple’s big format digital executions which were actually the inspiration for these new standard sizes) and if there are steps taken to preserve UX by being conservative with how it’s deployed, then they might actually be well-received.
Wait, what? People who are uninformed are bitching and think they understand the industry better than others? Weird, I thought this was the internet or something.
