One Month of Interrupted News
I’ve touched on this before but what if you were reading your morning newspaper and a car drove by and ripped it off you or a sheep pops up and shoots a champagne cork in your face or a Transformer sets fire to the page? You wouldn’t be happy with it would you?
Have a look at the homepages of the major Australian news sites during June…
That’s 16 different brands who thought it would be a good idea to disrupt their audience to deliver a message that they didn’t ask for while they are enjoying their early morning ‘me time’ before starting their busy day.
More disturbing is that every major news site apart from The Australian encourage this practice. It seems that the pressure on physical newspapers survival has placed increased pressure on their online replicates to pick up the slack. And because online readers don’t pay a dime for the privilege it seems that it is fair that you can treat them however you want – fill their screens, pull the page away, make them wait ten seconds – it doesn’t matter, they’re getting it for free. When this became normal practice for online newspaper sites it seemed fair for television news sites to do so as well.
The problem is, readers don’t see it as a privilege. It’s an option – one option among many. If these news sites continually neglect and annoy their readers they will go the same way as their traditional counterparts. After all, their main competitor wouldn’t treat their users like that…
UPDATE (3rd July 2009): It seems that I spoke too soon on The Australian. Narrowly missing June and appearing on the 3rd July, we have this execution for Macquarie…
Related posts:
An excellent point, well-made. Awesome, Nathan.
[...] This post was Twitted by wheelyweb [...]
Someday, the newspapers will realise advertising is much more important to them than it is to us. And that we will find better ways of blocking them.
Fortunately the ones with better content, like Crikey and New matilda and others, will continue to carter for the user/reader, and not the advertiser.
YUou don’t _have_ to go there….
Love your work!
Bang on. Nothing says disrespect for your audience like an OTP ad. Adding insult to injury, there seems to be a growing practice of making them near impossible to close.
Amen to that. My other gripe is the new prevalance of autoplaying video ads with sound turned on. SMH i’m looking at you.
Great point.
Speaking as an ex-agency-sider (!) the view that planners and clients have is that it’s the last ‘mass reach’ environment where an audience spend a fair amount of time, so we should push the message as far as possible and be visually impactful to get their attention.
I don’t think anyone stopped to think about the annoyance factor and the negative perception that could develop of the news site and the brand as a result of the interruption.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head and i hope some media planners read this and learn from it…
I totally agree with Dan, autoplaying audio is so offensive. I usually read the paper online by command-clicking so each story opens in a new tab – SMH always has an autoplay audio ad so I have to find where it’s coming from to close it. I usually just leave the SMH at this point because it’s so annoying.
That car ad on Fairfax was the bane of my existence last week. The worst part? Not even sure what brand/model it was selling. Advertising failure.
Simple explanation for this is EOFY … I can say this with some assurity after 7 years agency and publisher side. There is also the reality that 90% of these news businesses are not making money online and need to extract more revenue to pay the bills.
Re “I don’t think anyone stopped to think about the annoyance factor and the negative perception that could develop of the news site and the brand as a result of the interruption.”
Actually, I think *some* do … it just has to be illustrated properly to the client. There is a belief, an incorrect one, that people will tolerate this sort of interruption online. Personally, I don’t think they will. Impact and annoyance are two different things but the agencies role is to demonstrate this to client with more than just anecdotal opinion.
Thanks for the comments guys, good to see I’m not alone on this one. I think the general take out is that even if there is increased recognition this is not only offset but taken into negative perception by the intrusion and annoyance factor. While EOFY may have increased the occurrence slightly I’m pretty confident that if I did the same test in three months time we’d have a similar result. Coming from an agency side as well, I totally agree with Zoe and Ben that there is often a chasm between understanding impact and perception.
Thanks for collecting those all in one place Nathan, I’m sending this around now.
Isn’t it interesting that it was for this EXACT reason that I clicked away from The Age five minutes ago and came here.
I don’t really understand the objection with most of them – as long as there is a clear, unambiguous and functional “close” control then all but the most web-unsavvy can click right past them. Even in the reduced-size screen grabs on the slideshow I could immediately identify the close button on most of them – on some of them I couldn’t, and these ads deserve to be condemned.
Maybe I’m missing the point?
Thank you for making this an issue. It is my pet hate. I work in the media and therefore appreciate the commercial pressures – but annoying the customers isn’t the answer. Pop-ups are acknowledged as a major turnoff – that’s why browsers have pop-up blockers – yet advertisers seem to think they’re clever. Ditto for post-it notes stuck to the front page of my morning paper!
I was getting very annoyed with this too and spoke to a mate who is a serious IT geek about what I could do. He solved it quite simply for me and I hardly get any of these ads anymore. Apparently almost all of this type of advertising (in fact most advertising on the web nowadays) is delivered via the Flash plugin that most users install on their computers. Well if you are using Firefox as your webbrowser there is a wonderful little addon called “Adblock Plus” available here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
And once you install it add the “Easylist” subscription which keeps an updated list of websites to block that are producing these ads in your webbrowser. EasyList available here:
http://easylist.adblockplus.org/
The webpage has a simple oneclick button to add the EasyList to Adblock Plus.
Once that’s done you basically don’t get anymore flash ads on webpages you visit anymore. Which means apart from anything else webpages load faster because their not loading all the advertising and you’re also using less of your monthly internet allowance to view webpages.
I highly recommend trying it as it’s very easy to uninstall through the Firefox tools menu if it doesn’t suit your purposes, but to be honest I’ve now had all my friends install it on their computers and I’m yet to hear of one uninstalling it.
couldn’t have said it any better p3syf1z
Ah good old p3syf1z – he’s a fountain of truth!
Leave your response!
Another Advertising Wanker
Nathan Bush
Digital Strategist at DP Dialogue
Brisbane, Australia
Subscribe
archive
Blogroll
Recent Comments
Wanker tweets...
Most Read
Most Commented
Top Comments & Smart Folk