Publishers Are Trying To Annoy Users Less
The New Technologies for Web Publishers panel thoroughly covered the world of rich media advertising (do people still call it that?) from the publishers’ perspective, starting with a comprehensive technology review and leading into an insightful discussion among executives of Yahoo!, CNET and New York Times Digital.
One lesson learned: Don’t try to get your client’s crappy creative onto nytimes.com. Lincoln Millstein, EVP at the Times, told of a creative approval process in which 60 percent of submitted ads are rejected and decisions have been known to escalate to the publisher’s office. Oy!
Adrian D’Souza from CNET and Hunter Madsen from Yahoo! both described very thorough and logical approaches to ad serving technologies, evaluating new offerings based on advertiser demand (as opposed to vendor demand, which tends to be insatiable), thorough technical testing and a judgment about the sophistication and strength of the company behind the offering. Hunter mentioned a browser testing threshold of 80 percent of viewers seeing non-default ads.
The tenor of the discussion was very positive, with all panelists indicating growing success in operationally handling creative, as well as minimizing user annoyance. The sense was that publishers could force advertising quality to improve with increasing sell-through rates. This, in turn, should lower annoyance complaints as creative becomes more interesting and compelling. Hunter, in particular, pointed out that Yahoo! had moved beyond the basic IAB guidelines for rich media and has begun looking at how the hovers and expanding banners interfere with navigation elements on the site, with an eye to minimizing the time ads cover up key areas.
Responding to an audience question, both Lincoln and Hunter acknowledged using unprompted audio on certain sections of their sites, such as Movies and Automotive. The big next step, everyone agreed, was video, with quality and speed as the key barriers to publisher adoption.
