Advertising as a Differentiator for Online Experiences
by Amanda WilloughbyDictionary.com’s recent redesign is a great example of how critical it is to consider the effect of advertising on your site’s overall experience. Their clean design and careful attention to information hierarchy is decimated by the slapped on advertisements. Of course you can pay to make the ads go away — or you can just ignore them.
And that’s what people do. Jared Spool, among others, has been talking and writing about the Death March for Advertising and how research shows that web site visitors quickly develop techniques to avoid looking at ads. It’s not enough to make online ads contextually relevant — Google has done a decent job with that and people have still learned to ignore them.
According to articles published by the Newspaper Association of America and Nielson Media Research, advertising dollars are moving from print to online at an increasing pace. The effect of this is raising the bar on the quality of the online ad experience — we all expect more. Adaptive Path advertises on The Deck, a network that targets design and creative professionals. The Deck serves ads only for products and services recommended by members in their network. This strategy effectively connects site visitors with businesses they are far more likely to find valuable.
Beyond improved contextual relevance and recommendations from trusted sources, the value of a site’s ad inventory can be increased by considering the role of advertising during the design process. Michael Beirut posted recently about Helmut Krone, “one of the greatest designers ever to live [and] an advertising art director” and noted the gap today between design and advertising. This gap is in fact a gigantic opportunity for companies willing to consider innovating with the role advertising plays in the overall experience of their site.
This entry was posted
on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Idealism, uncensored, Interface design, What were they thinking?.
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