Attack of the Animated Web Page Ads
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Aidan_Maconachy]Aidan Maconachy
Annoying animated ads have been taking over cyber space lately.
How are you supposed to read a column when a moving pen keeps drawing a disco dancing silhouette on someone's arm over and over - a silhouette that does a frenetic John Travolta type dance in the corner of your eye. As if we aren't visually overloaded enough these days!
You can just imagine a bunch of advertising nerds sitting around trying to devise better ways to grab our attention. One says "yeah let's have the chipmunk race up and down the tree. Even if they try and read through one end of a rolled newspaper they won't be able to escape the blur".
Advertisers sometimes get it badly wrong. It's not only about animation, or concept originality or design flair. They need to consider what type of reaction the ad induces in the viewer. In a lot of cases animated ads on a page of text induce resentment, if only because people like to be bale to focus when they're reading.
A blogger I was reading on this topic said he scrolls rapidly on a page he visits to block out a hyperactive squirrel and an aerobic blond on eternal repeat.
One Daily Telegraph page I was on had a firing canon, that kept recoiling as it blasted again ... and again ... while some other frenetic behavior was going on in a box further up the page. It was like trying to read in the middle of the Battle of Waterloo.
Why don't advertisers understand the basic truth that a lot of people who are visually assaulted will make a point of NOT clicking on the ad. Some people even develop a prejudice against the product. Have advertisers ever speculated how much they may have lost as a result of turning off potential consumers? Might make for an eye opening survey.
But maybe there is a sizable demographic out there that becomes hypnotized by repetitive motion. Their eyes glaze over as someone's head gets tattooed forty times in a row and they simply cannot resist the urge to click on the cranium.
The sites hosting these ads, need to think of their visitors' eye health. If I go blind after a site has upped the number of animated ads to four while I'm struggling from sentence to sentence in a page that is like an ant colony, I have no doubt there is a Florida lawyer who will be very happy to hear from me.
Aidan Maconachy is a freelance writer and artist based in Ontario. You can visit his blog at http://aidanmaconachyblog.blogspot.com/
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