I really like what Boston Common does – collecting snippets from Boston-area blogs, and displaying them in aggregated meme-like fashion. I get a lot of hits from the site, and I appreciate the work Adam Gaffin does every day.
BUT! Today, I noticed that Boston Common is now running floating Flash (Rich Media) advertisements from Travelocity. Hovering over the content! I find these things irritating, especially when it specifically delays your access to the information.
I understand the need for online advertising, and revenue, but surely this is more of an annoyance than an effective marketing tool.
Eyeblaster was, I believe, one of the first companies to convince clients that banner ads were pass?, and that has made Eyeblaster an industry leader.
Honestly, for me, it’s enough to make me go make hotel reservations at Expedia. Until I see a floating flash ad from them!
Still, I guess I’m willing to endure the ads, as long as Adam keeps doing what he’s doing. How can you bite the hand that feeds you?
It’s an experiment. I’ve never had pop-ups on Boston Online before (except once, for a couple of hours, by mistake). I thought this one would be less offensive, in part because it doesn’t actually open up a new window (I hate having to close all those extra windows all the time – especially all those endless Orbitz ads). What did surprise me, though, was that there’s no easy way to turn the thing off – no closing X or anything (you click on the bottom part of the “frame” and it brings up another windowish thing that does have one). Grr. The campaign runs for another week or so; after that, I don’t think I’ll repeat.
yea, i think the single most annoying thing is that there isn’t any “X” to close the ad.
Why not look at ways to integrate it around the main content? Instead of interupting the flow?
well, i hope you made some scratch, and keep up the good work!
Next to Eyeblaster, there are two other main vendors of these transparent Flash ads: Unicast Ad4ever and United Virtualities Shoshkeles. All three of them at the time were at the forefront of developing this product. The only difference is in the way they pre-load, deploy, serve and track them.
The ad format has its drawbacks, however. Most of these ads have problems appearing over form-fields and other Flash objects. I’m kinda happy that no one has seemed to solve that problem yet, because it had me freaking stumped for 2 months straight… 2 years ago.
Speaking of biting the hand that feeds, this was my actually my old job while at the in-house studio at DoubleClick as a designer. My boss put me on development projects per quarter to develop new products around the time that these three companies were vending their product to ad-serving companies. And I, along with a product manager (whom I lived with at the time) developed The Click’s transparent Flash product so we could serve and take the moola for production, alongside serving with with our own ad platform. Alas, I got sh*t-canned after they took my secret sauce, hired someone to replace me, and then they took me and my housemate’s baby. Feh.
And I never did get that raise. I think that most of us on the net should just be glad that these ads aren’t interstitials, otherwise you’d have to sit through the WHOLE loop on the page before you get to interact with the site you wanted to look at. Now THAT would be TRULY annoying, and it CAN be done.