Monday, June 01, 2009

How online shoots itself in the foot

There are many good reasons to put your money into digital marketing, and here’s one big reason not to.

This would have to be one of the most annoying local online ad campaigns in recent memory.

Take a look.



Now I agree that the problem here is not that’s an online ad, the problem essentially is that it's just bad advertising. It’s annoying. Really annoying. And most banner ads aren’t nearly as annoying as this.

Banner ads are also a small part of digital marketing. There’s everything from social media, search, video, rich media, social networks, blogs and everything else in between for marketers to get involved in.

But the problem is that this ad is so bad, it’s detrimental to the practice of digital marketing. It gives the online market a bad rap. Sure I can name numerous TV ads that are annoying, that are repeated over and over. But this Mocca.com banner ad just seems worse in many ways. And as people spent more time online than any other medium these days, maybe it is. Not only does it make you actually surf away from the site that the ad appears on, it’s so bad that someone has spent time to upload it to YouTube just to show the world how painful it is.

I'm not saying you shouldn't put your money into digital - if you read the pages of Marketing and our online properties, you'll see we truly believe in the power and effectiveness of good digital marketing. But for god's sake think through and test what you plan to do before you do it, and at the very least, make sure you aren't out there annoying people.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

man, that's one annoying ad. another one was the insing.com's nasi lemak ad.

my question is why companies would allow ads like that to run on their sites, when all it serves is to make people click away from the site.

of course there's the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" spiel, but really, i'm sure Singapore's creative pool has more talent than that.

Steph said...

I'm like a horse with blinders. Seems I've conditioned myself to view a webpage sans banners. But I have to say the only thing worse than a badly conceptualised banner ad is a badly conceptualised PAGE TAKEOVER.

Anonymous said...

maybe in the age of ad-blockers, people behind e process might be desensitised to, or not notice, bad ads (cos they don't experience them).
Roadtesting should be more rigorous, i mean, after 10secs, whoever dreamt up these ads wld've realised how annoying they are. Unless they were deaf or computers on mute.

Invading sites i actually enjoy surfing and soiling them with your "click,click" or "nasi lemak?" were the last straw though. That's just being rude.

Banners should stand out but for the right reason. It's like staring at the hot chick because she's got spinach stuck to her teeth. FAIL.

Percevale said...

Hey,

Look at it this way. It gets bad enough, people start to lampoon it and comment. The readers of those blogs start to wonder what the fuss is about.

They get exposed to the product.

Mission accomplished.