Tag Archive for 'User Experience'

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360° Advertising: the lack of synergies online

I was just flicking through “The Economist” (An old edition from May 10th Edition 2008) and got stuck on the adverts. Well I work in an interactive Ad agency so I suppose that it’s a professional misfortune to make this type of comment. Even though this is from a year ago it still happens that you see ads like this with no URL or at the best a URL that is for the company and not the product. I can’t understand why, on so many adverts, which will have cost the companies advertising a fair amount of money, there is no continuity or synergy with the online, no link to a website. I checked 2 consecutive adverts with no URLs, (no links to websites). I then looked through several pages and many had URLs but these two were for HSBC and Chevron had nothing and I can’t understand why there would be an advert created for a magazine that could not/would not be relayed on line.

HSBC Premier

When I was working on an automobile account in a web agency recently I found out that less than 5% of the ad budget was spent for online advertising, the majority being spent for TV then outdoors with online getting below 5%. I know many people still spend a lot of time in front of the TV but is 5% a real fit for the Internet currently ? Can you really create an effective online campaign to reach the numbers that are currently spending a large amount of their time online with such a small amount of the overall Ad budget ?

Even if it is an appropriate reflection of how people spend their time, I still deplore the lack of synergy that occurs between TV and outdoor ads versus online. Triggering people’s appetite to engage and continue the experience of a well thought through campaign online is so easy and yet so few companies actually do it. How many full blown campaigns that really use the potential for intelligently using TV, outdoors, radio etc. and online come to mind. Very few for most people because that type of synergy between Medias is very rare. Search Engine Optimisation may be a buzz word at the moment as it provides increased numbers of visitors when done properly but synergies the 360° type synergies between offline and online are way more effective in immersing people in your message!

If you can think of some cool synergies in your country please let me know and share the examples !

:)

Overlay site blocker

So you have heard about pop-up blockers, what about overlay site blockers ?
While reading an article about how behavioural marketing is placed just below SEO in terms of efficiency I wanted to check out the report from MarketingSherpa.
To set the scene, I have very large screen with a smaller screen to the right and had IE in the left screen at this point.
Suffice to say as you can see below the scroll bar only had an effect on the page behind and I could not even close the window to get to the page. The page greyed out behind the overlay would move up and down but the overlay itself didn’t budge an inch. So, no way to get to the close link on the overlay, and nothing else to do either. Only choices left: press the back button or close the browser. Wonderful user experience, not!

MarketingSherpa overlay site blocker

MarketingSherpa overlay site blocker

Enough of IE6 already

Let’s all shout loud and clear that we have had enough of having to cater for Internet Explorer 6, the quirks, the endless limitations and overall reduced user experience. Found this on Bowman‘s site. It is a link to a manifesto / petition to encourage people to move away from IE6, get a life and make the life of people creating HTML just that much easier and interesting for end users. IE6 does not comply with any standards other than those of Microsoft and now more than ever just hinders user experience in general. So please spread the word about the issues that IE is creating.
Do check out the site. It looks great and has a wonderful quote from Jeffrey Zeldman, (I translated his witty article Web 3.0 a while back):

“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.”

Bring IE6 down screenshot

Bring IE6 down screenshot

Bring down IE6 logo

Hilarious note: Pierre from work, has the same unfortunate task as myself, of having to spend ages testing and modifying HTML templates so they will work in IE6. Take a look at this very funny set of IE6 splash pages, Pierre sent me: http://blog.hugsformonsters.com/post/87657240/overly-judgemental-ie6-splash-pages