Ads are elbowing their way into news. This can’t be a good thing, can it?
A tipster writes:
You didn’t get this from me, but thought you’d like to see what they’re calling “innovative ads” in Fort Worth.
Hey, we’re all living with these things now. And it ain’t fun. But yes, this one seems particularly invasive.
If you need a closer look, though — like you might peer at an accident on the freeway — click on the thumbnail:
Our correspondent continues:
Apparently they also have car ads where the car runs into the copy.
Don’t know how it fits in to stuff, earthquakes and all, but thought other designers would like to see it. I just hope the Fort Worth ad director doesn’t start talking to [our ad director].
This in no way is meant to disparage the newsroom designer who had to produce this page.
Questions:
1) How much of a premium did the advertiser pay?
2) Was it enough to make up for the fact that really no other ads could run on this page?
3) Why not just sell them a full-page ad and surround it with white space? It would generate more eyeballs.
Great questions.
In this time of diminishing revenues — and diminishing newsrooms — I understand we have to look for money under every rock. But I sure hate that we’re doing it in ways that hamper the reader’s attention. And that’s what this does. It’s the print version of a pop-up ad.
I’m very familiar with this sort of thing. Back in Athens, Ga. — in the mid-1980s, before I landed my first full-time newsroom job — I designed ads for the Banner-Herald and Daily News. Part of our usual schtick was what we called Flex-Form ads. We’d have cars and cartoon dealers and Georgia Bulldog mascots and all sorts of art spilling out of ads and into the adjoining copy.
The difference, of course, was that these were classified ads. And the copy that found itself intruded upon was dummy classified advertising. No newshole was affected.
Seems like now, our industry doesn’t mind if a little newshole gets trampled by a rampaging ad.
Speaking of internet pop-up ads, it looks as if they’re taking pop-ups to the next level these days, too. Tim McGuire of Arizona State University wrote Friday:
Ford Motor Company owns football. American Express owns Texas. Pitney-Bowes owns business. If you didn’t know that you haven’t been reading The Arizona Republic’s AZ Central.com this week.
Without fanfare AzCentral has started to put two green lines under words in stories on the Money section and the Sports section. It appears stories in news and local sections are immune, but the web site has ways around that. It also appears that the underlines can change from minute to minute.
Here’s the Arizona Republic web site. See that
underlined, green word in the middle of the story?
Here’s a closer view. If you click on the word…
…You get a nice pop-up ad. Ads embedded
in stories. Interesting, huh? McGuire says that
The Indianapolis Star and The Atlanta Journal-
Constitution are using this same service.
—If you look closely at the ads on AzCentral you can figure out the service is supplied by Vibrant Media which offers “Vibrant In-Text Advertising.†A call to their New York offices late Friday afternoon got only a voicemail. From the web site you can glean that it is an international company.
A quick check revealed that The Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Reno Gazette Journal and The Indianapolis Star are also using Vibrant Media. The Wall Street Journal reported on the AJC’s use of the service in November of 2006. At the time the Journal quoted Poynter Ethics guru Bob Steele criticizing the practice, but it certainly has stayed below my radar until this morning. My distinct impression was that AZ Central just started the practice in the last few days. A student brought it up to me on Tuesday, and I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about.
McGuire walks us through several samples of AZCentral ads, pausing to laugh at some of the more humorous juxtapositions and recoiling in horror at a link from a Martina Hingis story:
The humor stopped on my very next search of the story “Hingis denies use of drugs.†The word “doping†was underlined. My click took me to a web search list of performance enhancing drug sites. Some of the sites featured articles about performance enhancing drugs, but others took me to sites selling products and conditioning. I will not judge the nature of those sites, but I will say my son and I would have had a talk if I saw him shopping on such sites. When I mentioned that unsettling opinion to [Michael Coleman, Vice-President of Digital Media for AzCentral], he replied “that’s the exact reason we wanted to try this before making a commitment.â€
McGuire closes:
Coleman says there has been a lot of negative reaction to this concept internally, but “I have not seen or heard a single reaction from an external reader.†When I commented that this move has really flown under the radar, Coleman related a story about how Forbes.com tried something like this a few years ago and got creamed by the industry.
Conceding that this technology is much better than before Coleman also mused, “I guess I wonder if people in the industry are becoming more accepting as revenues have declined so rapidly.â€
Yes. We, as an industry, are being forced to adopt things like flex-form ads and embedded links in stories.
But do such things hurt readability? Does it harm our credibility? Does it offset what we’re trying to do with news design?
Does it run counter to our values?
Damn good questions.
—
EDIT
Way down in comment No. 4 for this post, Rob Schneider, Presentation Director of The Dallas Morning News, writes:
Dude, Kroger has been doing this in our papers for a long time. About a year ago, we started forcing a lot more white space around the ads instead of jamming copy right next to the ad, which was what we thought we had to do. I don’t think we’ve heard anything from Kroger and the various advertising who routinely do this in our A section.
I’ve sent the PDF to Charles, if he wants to post it up.
Of course, I’d love to post it. However, I have no clue how to post jpegs to the comments section. So I’ll have to do it here. Here’s the page to which Rob refers:
And here is the Ft. Worth page (left) compared to the corresponding Dallas page (right):
Thanks, Rob!
November 5th, 2007 at 11:31 am
I am so depressed. Moving to Canada won’t even solve this one.
November 5th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I’m surprised you didn’t pair these new-form advertisements with today’s release of the most recent circulation figures. Newspaper companies are obviously feeling pressures from any number of sources, and they’re reacting out of desperation, it seems. While my paper has accepted some of these “flex form” ads, we’ve also rejected some. Here it’s the editor’s call.
November 5th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
To me, the Kroger/spiderman ad is worse than a pop-up ad online. A pop-up ad, even the annoying ones that runs an animation across the screen, can be closed or goes away when it’s done running and allows you to read the content unhindered. There’s no way to make this ad “go away” in print.
November 5th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Dude, Kroger has been doing this in our papers for a long time. About a year ago, we started forcing a lot more white space around the ads instead of jamming copy right next to the ad, which was what we thought we had to do. I don’t think we’ve heard anything from Kroger and the various advertising who routinely do this in our A section.
I’ve sent the PDF to Charles, if he wants to post it up.
November 5th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I’ve gotta say, that I don’t understand the complaints about this type of advertising. I think if we focused more on making sure this advertising is well designed itself and that we make the page around it designed like it makes sense, we’d all be a lot better off.
And I also don’t understand using circulation numbers as an excuse for this either. If we continue to use circulation numbers as the axis with which we revolve, that number is going to keep consistently down. That doesn’t mean we’re reaching fewer people. It does mean we’re relying less on the old tricks to keep those circulation numbers up (third party subscriptions, and ridiculously cheap discounts to get people to subscribe to the paper for a few months and then quit, for example). It also means we refuse to change our rules when all the other rules have changed around us.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
And to the point of “I hope their ad director doesn’t talk to mine”: this is from an agency, not the brainchild of an individual ad director. And I can’t imagine there are many papers (USA Today obviously being one of them) that are going to turn away this advertising.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
I read the Courier-Journal (Louisville) daily for work — we round up and link to articles pertaining to state news each morning over at Stateline.org
What I’ve noticed about these in-line ads is how hard they make it to copy and paste text to link to articles. In addition to all the ethical sort of arguments about these ads, it seems like they would put off our Web 2.0 friends who we want linking to our stories in their blogs.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
This looks like a strong candidate for Eyetrack study. Do “embedded” ads get more attention and retention than stacked ads? What stacks work best for news and what for advertising?
Every advertising director I’ve spoken with about this (not that many, to be honest) has believed in the intrusive, non-square ad. There seems to be a long-standing belief that ads which touch editorial content get more attention.
Ad Depts charge extra for the funky ads, and I presume they are selling the client on standing out from the herd. The question is, does it actually work or are they bullshitting the clients?
Anyone out there got a line on some of the advertising dept. lore? Is there any research behind that lore?
November 5th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
The latest Eyetrack showed that full page ads got less eye stops than large ads that have editorial on them (5 by 16 ads, for example). I think that would at least back up part of their assumption. But I think research on those types of ads would be great.
November 5th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
I don’t know if they work or not, but we deal with integrated ads pretty often. I think readers notice, but I’m not sure if they are annoyed, or pleasantly surprised. The sales sheet says the ads “work themselves into the content of the page, providing an eye-dazzling advertisement for your brand.”
And a major headache for anyone trying to design around them.
November 5th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
I find the online, in-story links to be kinda disturbing.
It feels like product placement in a news story. I hate product placement in TV shows and movies, but at least those don’t cross ethical lines. Not that advertising doesn’t already impact editorial to a certain extent… but, how long before a reporter is asked to use certain words so that advertisers are guaranteed links in a story? I think allowing even the possibility of those questions in readers’ minds calls our journalistic standards into question. I know I take any product recommendation from a magazine with a huge grain of salt, especially when I see that company advertising later in the magazine.
November 5th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Charles,
Yet another stellar post.
Autumn, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
The link to ads words in those stories are highlighted on-the-fly- using keywords, tagging, and other SEO tactics.
Writing headlines for Google is already an accepted practice in many online shops. So is writing another meta-layer into blog posts that expand upond the sometimes crytic headlines and call out post descriptions blog templates and CMS editors use.
While those meta fields are good tools to have for getting your content found and indexed properly - to an ad bot agnecy they are fresh meat on the hook.
It is easy to spot Web sites that use this dubious practice - and it doesn’t take long to learn that you never, ever click on a link with more than one underline.
If your revenue depends on using misleading linking practices then guess what. Instead of writing keywords for your community - you will end up using the keywords that bring in the most money. Long term - this is not a good solution and, by the way, not the first time these type of alternate link payola schemes have surfaced.
And I like the Web slinger ad. Fun and used right could work out just fine. Like, may a listings page! Oh yeah you charge a full-page rate and get the cash up front.
November 7th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
The online, in-story links aren’t just disturbing, but they’re also a common sign of some malware that gets installed on Windows machines. When I first saw the links embedded in stories on AZCentral’s site, my first thought was that I had picked up some sort of malware. Then, I remembered that I was on my Mac and that sort of spyware isn’t available for OSX (thank goodness.) Some of the embedded links like that generated by spyware are vicious, and I do have to wonder if programs embedded into the stories like that can lead to problems for users browsing the sites.
I’m of mixed feelings on the Web slinger ad. I’m very glad that Dallas fought for, and won, the right to more white space. It does a much better job at setting off that ad and making it obvious that yes, it is advertising. We’ve had a few odd-shaped ads here, but nothing quite like that.