Dan Frost, for the Los Angeles Times:
They’re bigger, they’re bolder, and soon they’ll be covering up large swaths of some of your favorite Web pages.
The Online Publishers Assn. on Tuesday released several new in-your-face advertising formats designed to be both more obtrusive and interactive.
…
Studies show we ignore banner ads,said Jose Castillo, a new media consultant in Johnson City, Tenn. “Making them bigger and more intrusive won’t work. We will tune those out as well.”
Through this premise we find ourselves in a familiar conundrum: it is the reading experience that brings people to the web, thereby making them available to the siren song of the advertisers; but it is the advertisers, who, in their effort to gain purchase over ever more significant corners of our brains, must distract and diminish the reading experience lest they be ignored. The story goes that every so often an advertiser surprises with a particularly innovative method of annoyance, after which a certain amount of time passes and we learn — automatically, involuntarily — to tune them out.
To me, this venture is clearly a terrible idea. Annoying users is a poor choice of business model.
