TV Commercials Go Online

Culture

from the misunderstanding-the-medium dept

I’ve complained before about the rise in annoying TV-style commercials embedded in web pages. Just yesterday I had to hunt through a series of open browser windows to figure out which one was yelling at me (and it was yelling). When I finally figured out which one it was, I tried pressing the “stop” button displayed with the ad, and that did nothing. I finally found the “mute” button, which shut it up until the page automatically reloaded and the commercial began again. Needless to say, I don’t have very positive feelings towards the product being advertised. It sounds like these sorts of ads are only going to get worse. Advertising execs who still can’t understand the nature of the internet, and who don’t want to waste any more creative effort on designing different ads for the internet, are increasingly just throwing their TV commercial online. They’re not doing this in a smart way, like Honda did, by creating compelling and entertaining advertising that people want. They’re just doing it because they seem to think that disruptive and intrusive advertising is a good thing – rather than something that gets a negative response from people. Furthermore, as people are finally making it clear they don’t like bad and irrelevant TV commercials, these execs are taking the backwards step of assuming that means they just need to shove out more of these ads people don’t want. The smart advertising exec would realize (like Honda did with their commercial and BMW did with BMW films) that advertising is free content and people get online to get free content – so if you make it good, relevant, and entertaining, people will come and search it out. Unfortunately, those same execs seem to think that if it’s “good, relevant, and entertaining” then it’s no longer a promotion, and it’s something they should charge for.