Monday, September 22, 2008

Over the top taken even further


If FD keep doing this I reckon a few of their loyal users will leave.

Ad overkill to the extreme. I'm not convinced there's any real benefactor from FDTV other than FD and their EBIT - seems to bombard the user with more ads than they need, and I think advertisers might start to question their rates when ads are running on top of other ads.
Where's the content?


4 comments:

Mariel said...

It's going to be interesting to see if any changes will happen in the market if over advertising like this continues..

Pages like that always remind me of the "A Bicyclops Built for Two" episode of Futurama. Where the Planet Express gang take a trip into the internet, and are bombarded with ads which they have to physically fight through to get to content.

Granted there's lots of dirty chatroom, and porn jokes, The point remains valid! I switch off when i see an website full of ads. I'm building a job site of my own, and we're incredibly careful about what we advertise.

Are people measuring the success of these ads? That's what I would like to know.

Ben Shepherd said...

hey mariel - i know the episode you mean ... pretty on point analogy :)

I'd say that people are measuring the success of these sorts of ads - and hopefully (I know we are) in a deeper way (ie brand shifts as opposed to straight click volume CTR) ... and this in turn should impact on the true value of these placements.

I think it's arrogant/naive for some publishers to believe they can jam more and more ads into a page and charge MORE per ad unit.

Ruud said...

Hi Ben,

Do you think the introduction of Volume networks and the increasing amount of performance networks have anything to do with this? Standard advertising (non blind and targeted I might add) are becoming a trading commodity very fast and go for very cheap prices. Advertisers more and more shift there budgets towards this sort of opportunity (for right or wrong). This means that publishers like Fairfax have to come up with bigger and better ideas (out of the box is long gone, some can't even see the box anymore) to command the dollars from advertisers on a premium base. I agree this example is obviously not in the best interest of the reader, but i can't imagine a smiley ad would help either (granted this viewpoint is deliberately oversimplified).

Let me know your thoughts

Ben Shepherd said...

hey ruud - i agree to a point. there is pressure on the larger players to try and differentiate from the volume networks/aggregators/blind networks etc - but i think by adding more and more ad space and allowing more and more dumb executions they're probably killing their best asset - the trust of users.

I think these guys need to do more to understand and them communicate the unique benefits of their audience and the content they produce in order to extract more from the market in terms of CPM rates, share of wallet