December 18, 2003

N.Y. Times has video ads done wrong

I’m not suprised that the New York Times has video ads — they’ve tended to be pio­neers in ad for­mats — but I’m suprised that they’re done so badly.

This morn­ing I was trying to read this story when all of a sudden my screen started flick­er­ing, my CPU mon­i­tor jumped to 100 per­cent used and my system slowed to a crawl.

But hey, it’s all worth it to see an ad for Nexium. Not! (Hat tip)

When I checked at work the ad wasn’t there but I’ve got screen­shots: page-​view, close up of ad.

The ad was pre­sented via Java applet, and I’m not sure who wrote the code but it prac­ti­cally brought my Pen­tium 4 rig to stand-​still.

There’s noth­ing wrong with video ads as a medium but they should prob­a­bly follow some rules (these could go for edi­to­r­ial video too):

Ads should not interfere with a user’s computing exerpience — test thoroughly

Video ads should always present an image first that the user must click to access the video.

The image should always explicity tell the user that they’ll receive video if they click the image and should include pertinent info like file size and whether there is sound.

Once the video has started playing there should be a clearly identifiable way to stop the video and mute the sound.

The video should never loop.

That said, I’d make one adden­dum to the list: pro­vide a down­load this ad link. If you’re going to run video ads, they should be par­tic­u­larly cre­ative and enter­tain­ing. Some users might want to down­load the ad for later view­ing or to show to a friend. (For doubters, how many folks went to, or knew folks who went to Ad Critic before it became pay?).

Side note: I really wish I could down­load some of those really cre­ative Flash ads for Abso­lut that were run­ning on The Onion.

I men­tioned this before, but Flash seems like a rea­son­ably cross-​platform way to deliver the video and the afore­men­tioned rules could be easily car­ried out in Flash.

Filed under: Business,Web design

Next:
Previous:

Related

Comments