You hate them. We both hate them. Humans hate them.

They flare, blink, flash, spark, flicker, change color, expand, pop-up, pop-in, pop-under, roll over, dance, roar, scream and howl.

So humans developed technologies to avoid them.
Created little things called plug-ins to block them.
But most importantly, humans adapted and developed the banner blindness. Oh, you don’t know what banner blindness is? Well, that’s pretty simple: humans tend to ignore, consciously or unconsciously, any banner-like information.

Pretty bad for banner advertisers, isn’t it?

But why did we get here? How did we end up hating a form of Internet advertising that was originally designed to be engaging, attention grabbing, informative, fun, and especially, effective?

Well, mostly because of the mistakes and excesses made by advertisers and media agencies when looking for the users’ clicks. They started a race for the Internet surfers’ attention and, as a result, banner ads became more annoying, more intrusive, more tasteless and… you know what? More ineffective.

We want to fix that.

This is what BannerSnack Blog is all about. So prepare for articles about the banner ads industry: dos and don’ts, common practices, tips and standards. …And examples – we can’t let the fun part out, can’t we?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under News & Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.