Obtrusion

The always enlightening BoingBoing.com ran a quick little piece on some recent advertising featured on Slate Magazine's homepage, and the annoyed response it drew from readers looking to just, you know, read the darn articles. Such people, would be greeted thusly:




Yikes.

The offending ads belong to VW, and though it appears they have either run their course or cannot be seen by incoming Canadian IP's, they raise an interesting question concerning taste and obrtusivness in online advertising: of course, you can make the ads as big and 'engaging' as you like, but is this really effective marketing?

Slate is a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, and a quick check of a few of its sister-sites reveal a similar tale. Right now, they all sport animated Apple ads that cover the middle half of the browser window upon launch; forcing the viewer's eye to intake how green the new laptops are. So, well, you cannot read anything on the site without scrolling away.

This may seem like a small complaint, but I find it annoying when a site's immediate focal point is an ad. I appreciate the effort to get infront of the reader and win a little mindspace, but I didn't come to Slate to learn about how green the new Apple notebooks will be. How should a marketer balance the need to be seen, and the equally important need to not annoy the audience? There is a narrow border between acceptable presence (which does not necessarily mean peripheral) and overbearing obtrusion. The Washington Post Co. and its advertisers seem to have steered towards the latter in this case.