As I see it, those companies, their boards of directors, and those who make advertising decisions for those companies (none of whom are known to me to post at or admin/moderate the SDMB) are all a bunch of cunt-lapping fucknuggets. They should all choke on the used tampons of aids-infected crackwhores, and when they’re done with that, they should gargle the maggot chunked afterbirth of aborted fetuses. May they all become unemployed and forced to blow diseased goats on the internet, just to get something warm in their oversized bellies.
If I want to buy some piece of lame cuntwaffling shitstained unnecessary crap, I’ll take my fucking ass to a goddamned motherfucking store and buy the cocksucking cumdribbling garbage when I fucking feel like it. Further, I will avoid buying any product I’ve seen advertised in a motherfucking banner or goddamned popup ad. That loose-boweled shit stinks worse than week old corpses rotting in the sun, and really pisses me right the fuck off.
I object to the principle of the thing. I find such advertising intrusive, annoying, and unlikely to produce the desired result. I should not have to seek out software to prevent such things from appearing on my computer screen.
Then again, the banners that are animated and have figures dancing or jumping around about mortgage loan offers or night school are …um… not very nice. They are lame. They suck up bandwidth. And, as I’ve unfortunately learned, not every neighborhood in a city is well served by a given wireless company, in particular my neighborhood and my wireless provider. If I’m at a coffeeshop struggling to stay on line with two crappy tiny ticks on the signal strength indicator (out of a possible four or five solid bars), I do not want to wait for dancing night school students or the mortgage loan graphic bird with a feather to click on for each of the fifty U.S. states to load.
As others have said, I don’t mind stationary banners. But, I really, really don’t like banner ads, pop ups or pop unders that feel the need to freaking talk to me.
I especially hate the one with the video of that big fatass dancing, and which was obviously filmed with a cheap camcorder. I’ve seen this bitch advertising mortgages, night schools, and probably a bunch of other shit.
Methinks many people in this thread are ignorant of utilities like Flashblock, Adblock, and NoScript. Annoying animated ads are pretty much a thing of the past for me now.
AT&T did the first one with GeoCities and a handful of other sites back in the day. It caused a big backlash on GeoCities because the ads showed up below the fold and the audio started playing as soon as the page loaded, so people heard this disembodied voice and had no idea it was associate with an ad. FAIL for user experience.
Most reputable publishers won’t take ads with auto-play audio. The industry standard requirement is for user-initiation of sound. (Usually by clicking the little speaker with the slash through it…)
Not at all, though not every browser supports all of those add-ons. I occasionally have trouble with Firefox and a couple of websites I visit, and I can’t ad-block on Safari.
Anything that takes an action based on being moused over can be added to the list of things to be burnt at the stake. Nothing like having a totally silent ad expand and start talking to you when all you wanted to do was click on a link it’s now covering :smack:
There are actually some banner/text ad programs that I find useful; for example, the Project Wonderful banners that you see on a lot of webcomic or online fiction sites (like the Comics Curmudgeon etc.) have introduced me to a number of cool new authors and artists. It helps that they’re actually directly related to the site you’re on, instead of only tangentially connected due to keywords (like the Google ads below).
These ads are how many site owners can continue to provide me with free entertainment, so I’m not averse to them. When the owners use a system like Project Wonderful or BlogAds at least they’re making an effort to be unobtrusive and relevant to their visitors – which in turn, benefits them.
Sadly most sites don’t bother, so they stick with the default Google ads or the much more aggressive video / audio banners. Worst for me is that nasal harpy congratulating me for winning a new Nintendo Wii – gets right on my nerves. Plus her sudden voice scares the hell out of me every time. So yeah, the audio ones and popups are Of The Devil. (And lazy, uncreative website owners.)
Not only is she horribly obtrusive, but every statement that she makes is demonstrably false. (No, I haven’t “won” something if I have to buy a raftload of products and services to get it.) She should be prosecuted for fraud, and sentenced to spend one minute in prison for every time that ad has ever appeared.