Editor's note: Nobody who works in the interactive advertising industry doubts that rich media ads and video ads can be highly effective when it comes to raising awareness and clickthrough. As far back as a 2001 DoubleClick report, rich media ad creative was shown to boost brand awareness by 12 percent. More recently, Dynamic Logic MarketNorms data from Q1 of this year shows that branded rich media ad units significantly aid both brand awareness and brand favorability over their static counterparts. For a primer on rich media, see Lydia Estrada's "Rich Media: Everything You Need to Know".)
Likewise, highly intrusive versions of these ads can see a big lift in interaction, and therefore in ROI. But while there are short-term benefits to intrusive ads, there are also long-term risks. In this week's In Focus, Cia Romano of Interface Guru explores those risks and how to avoid them.
The fact that intrusive web ads abound does not mean that anyone particularly likes to see them. "We don't want to accept some of these ads," says an exasperated New York online publisher about a recent decision to run a full-screen takeover ad on the company home page. "But what do we say to $400,000?"
Good question. If you ask the web users in our recent usability lab test of ads, their advice would be: just say no.
In a study we conducted in May about user response to only ads, all users were unhesitating in expressing their negative feelings toward intrusive ad formats including:
- Takeovers
- Pop-overs
- Pop-unders
- Auto-launched audio/video
- "Stalker" ads
Users see these as the online equivalent of rude behavior. Users encountering these ad formats expressed intense dislike.
Worse yet: Users blame the most intrusive ad formats on the site publisher.
And the worst news is for the advertiser-- many users never learned what these ads were for because of their rush to close them.
The worst intrusive ad format is the takeover
Erin, the user pictured in the bottom right corner of this usability test, blames the site publisher for a takeover ad.
How we tested
In our first test, we asked users to visit abc.com, tvguide.com, netscape.com and mtv.com. Users were asked to identify any screen elements they thought were ads (versus content).
The goal: To assess what makes users perceive certain elements as ads and to measure the response to them.
Our conclusion: The difference between ads and content is often unclear, to the detriment of both advertiser and publisher.