01/05/2003
What's old (the interstitial) is new again (Unicast's full screen 'Superstitial' ads) in the world of online advertising.
While some ads can do their job well -- pitch a well-thought out message to a neatly targeted audience, unwanted ads are just plain irritating.
So what's new?
Read this first.
Ignore the hype.
Unicast's concept of full-screen advertising -- the 'Superstitial' might be patented, but it isn't exactly new. Yes, it adds an extra 300KB on the viewer's journey without them knowing until they move to the next piece of content, and it does fill the screen, but it's still a break in regular viewing, no matter how apparently smoothly this happens.
It's a huge bandwidth-munching interuption -- and we've been here before.
Four to five years ago, in the manic days of DotCom share-inflation, some major Websites carried a form of advertising known as the 'interstitial'.
In plain English an interstitial is an 'intervening space' between things.
I don't need to vent about the intervening element of that concept, because you already know these ads have pretty much died off along with great chunks of a once lively industry.
Most viewers clicked past interstitials before they had a chance to load, because unlike the ad-people working at the 'creative' agencies, most people didn't have the bandwidth to wait for a chunky Flash file to do its song-and-dance routine.
Those that did wait for the interstitial before viewing the next block of content (their reason for visiting in the first place) didn't buy whatever it was spruking.
OK, maybe someone's neighbour did, once.
Now you can say what you like about creativity and 'innovation' in advertising, but if ads don't cause people to pay for things or commit to some activity or thought, they're not doing their jobs. The end.
PS. Small ads containing messages you might be interested in can work... but I'm hoping we don't see more ads take up more screen real estate than the content. I really don't want to see a mere content banner.