I have spent a great many meetings and emails explaining to designers, copywriters, and creative directors what makes a good interactive (”rich media”) banner. My thesis can be pretty much boiled down to this:
a) The initial interactivity should not be a hard sell, i.e. it should not involve the user clicking through to another site, and it should not imply the user’s interest in purchasing the product (or service) being sold.
b) The interactivity should be a metaphor for the user’s presumed interest in the product. If the banner expands into a golf course for the user to play on, then it should turn out that the golf metaphor has been chosen for a reason that relates to the actual sale, even if it isn’t obvious at the time.
c) By the time the user is prompted to actually deliver the fatal click indicating that they might actually want the product, their state of mind has been changed to make them more receptive to the product than they were before. In corporate sales terminology, you might say that the purpose of the interactivity is to “socialize” the user on the idea of delivering the final click. (more…)
When before in retail history has a company released a follow-up product on the same day that they released enhancements to the original?
As I excited as I am about the increased speeds on the iPhone 3G, it feels wrong to give up my original iPhone so soon. The little guy is only a year old. Will I discard him now, at his most shining moment? Shouldn’t I give him a chance to show me what he can do with the hundreds of apps available from the SDK…with the thousands more that will surely come? And the GPS-esque self-locator on the maps feature has gotten so much better; I would have paid $100 just for that upgrade alone, but it was free.
You have to wonder what kind of use cases Apple has in mind for this business model. Is the 2.0 software supposed to make iPhone classic users think: “This is great; if only it could be faster?” Are they compromising because they don’t want to have to maintain two versions of the operating system?
When the iPhone classic came out, something we all often said (with awe): “There are only two hardware buttons. Apple could change the entire interface in an update.” It was quite something to think about, but it must be noted now that it didn’t happen, and we have to wonder whether it ever will. We’ll all be surprised if July 2009 doesn’t bring us yet another piece of hardware. How much will the interface change between now and then? Will each new version of the phone itself promise untold variations that will go unfulfilled due to additional updates? Or will all phones, no matter how old, continue to support new features insofar as they can, eventually puttering out like my housemate’s tangerine iMac?
Or will they go on living simply as phones? It’s unlikely that making a call will require more memory or hardware in the future than it does now…isn’t it?
Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane is making a series of cartoons that will only be available through Google AdSense banners, posted to sites where the target demographic already hangs out.
This is a good idea…if you’re selling the TV show, or advertising on the TV show, or if you’re Google. It’s not so great if you’re the publisher, or another advertiser on the site. Here’s why.
Assuming that the show is popular (and it will be, at least initially), it won’t be long before a list of the lucky sites gets posted somewhere under a header that reads “Here’s where to find Seth McFarlane’s Google TV show.” Fans will then go to those sites and obsessively refresh the pages until they see the show. Then, most likely, they’ll leave the site.
All those refreshes that happen before the TV show loads? That’s wasted inventory. Some other advertiser paid for it, and now their branding impact and CTR will plummet while each impression lasts a fraction of a second.
And those pageviews will affect the sites’s estimates of their own inventory, which they use to sell to other advertisers. Estimates will have to be adjusted from “we get a million pageviews per month” to “we get two million pageviews per month, but only when McFarlane’s show appears on AdSense, and when that happens, half the impressions are wasted if you’re any other advertiser.” And don’t forget: If you’re another advertiser, then when the McFarlane ads are running, (more…)
