04.15.08

New Internet Marketing Trend : Rollover Flashvertisements and what it means for you and your audience

Posted in Future?, Insights, New Ideas, Publish Often at 1208278916 by Sean Canton

So, it’s all about relevance and context, right? Why are we still publishing boring, static advertising to pull people in. Sure, there can be advertising targeted at certain web communities, but at best, you end up with advertising which is semi-relevant to the article you are reading.

Advertisements should offer a minimal investment of time and energy, low risk, required from the user, so why demand a click when a rollover will do? A well placed rollover flash first captures attention and then engages in an interactive advertising display. You don’t want to annoy the users by placing it in-front of content, that’s just rude. Only put ads which are directly relevant to the content you’re publishing and you get a much higher engagement from the users.

I have yet to find one of these ads which will serve in a reliable way. All I can recommend is to refresh HuffPost or WeatherUnderground until one appears. Maybe I’ll get off my lazy duff and make one, just for an example.

Once you engage an audience, there are limitless ways you can inform, involve or otherwise influence them, without the risk of clicking a link. Interactive presentations allow for demonstrations, on-demand video, product information, scenario solutions, e-mail collection, etc, etc. Time to brush off those dusty Flash skills!

Lets go through how this benefits an audience. They read an article, but of course, want more information, (that’s what we do on the internet, feed our information addiction). Instead of clicking on a link and taking a chance, rolling over what seems to be a relevant dynamic advertisement which then turns into a more engaging, interactive display involves much less risk on the part of the user. Less risk means more involvement.

Lets investigate how this benefits the advertiser. A prospective customer already knows what you’re about before they commit a click to investigate your site. This means a higher conversion rate, turning eyeballs into interest into dollars.

Yes, this involves somewhat more involved work with generating the ads and tracking the clicks, but, with the benefits I’ve outlined above, the future will be permeated with web pages that have interactive advertising beyond those annoying ‘kill the clown’ games, and those will generate much more involvement than static advertising.

04.07.08

Heirarchy of Relative Importance

Posted in Bike in Motion, Insights at 1207605581 by Sean Canton

So, this morning I biked a 6 mile ride to work. This has been the first time I’ve ridden to work since I’ve been in Portland, so it’s been almost 2 years now. It was wonderful, I was 30 minutes late to work, got pretty lost twice and the combined weight of my laptop and clothing seemed to easily double the weight of the bike;.

It was beautiful, the roads were clear, I got passed by maybe 5 cars for the road portion of my ride, the hills were not too steep, but plentiful and spaced far apart. It felt so wonderful to be out in the real world for about 50 minutes ( stop lights and getting lost accounted for a much longer ride then I had anticipated, which is why I was late ). I didn’t have to walk my bike up any hills, so I must be in better shape then I thought. Or maybe it’s just a matter of willpower.

I arrived at work flustered, sweaty, but feeling very alive. I went to drink an entire liter of water (go metric!), turn on my computer and rest in my chair for a moment. Since my windows laptop takes about 5 minutes to go from power on to a usable state, I spend a long time looking at a desktop, waiting for something to happen, either FireFox or Outlook.

The vast expanse of the immense outsides contrasted relative to the minuscule size of the firefox launch bar icon really struck me as bizarre. That I would spend the majority of my limited time on this planet with this tiny, artificial world as opposed to the big, real world outside the box is kind of dumb…

Yet in the course of my continued survival, that stupid little Outlook icon is much more important then the big outside world. Everybody now, can we say, “disconnect?”

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