Neato New Ad Units

Yahoo's been doing some cool stuff with their flagship homepage ad space lately. Both of these examples ran this week, and presumably each brand bought out the space for the whole day. Judging by the products it would appear the audience of this page skews heavily female.



The Crystal Light banner had some neat watery animation, and then expanded to become wallpaper behind the page's main content. At first it seemed a little gaudy and MySpace-like, but it grew on me.



The Lean Cuisine banner also had cool animation, with the vegetables dropping into the basket, followed by the product itself.

It's exciting to see the development of new ad formats. I attended a panel tonight, in fact, about the data-driven future of display. A lot of the stuff went way over my head, but from what I gathered, display is set to become the next big thing. Keep reading...

Advertising Atrocity

Quite possibly one of the oddest success stories in advertising, the epileptic banner ad continues to be a mainstay in online campaigns for various mundane services, such as car insurance and mortgage companies. Its first, and most famous, incarnation was the dancing silhouettes used by LowerMyBills.com that were virtually ubiquitous (pun intended) for several years. Recently a smaller, yet no less optically painful example of this form of advertising has popped up on weather.com. If you haven’t seen it, it shows two women gyrating jerkily, a telltale sign of an animated GIF file. One of the women, dressed in Midwest-modest attire, shakes her rear enthusiastically, as if dancing to some unheard bass-heavy beat. The other woman, smiling, does a lame “raise-the-roof” motion. Somehow this combination is supposed to incite me to check my car insurance. Huh? Someone please end this abomination of advertising. Keep reading...