Those blasted ads

Whatever happened to competition? These days, vendors all deny they're actually competing with anybody, because their products are so new and revolutionary, they've left everybody else in the dust. Just once, I'd like to see a company describe itself as "XYZ, Inc., a second-tier player in a really small market niche nobody has heard of."

Of course, that'll never happen. Instead we just see ever increasing numbers of ads making outrageous claims.

Why, it's even happening on the Internet, which brings up the question: Does anybody like banner ads?

Last week, I talked about the dark side of online commerce - the potential ability of advertisers and Internet sites to gather all sorts of data about you that you might not want collected. But even aside from that, there's the annoyance factor. Prompted by some feedback on last week's column, I undertook a not very scientific survey of about 10 users asking them what type of Internet advertising they disliked the most. The responses were quite interesting. Let's count them down:

3. Hyperactive banners

These are those great eye-straining "animated" ads that flash a sequence of marketing messages leading up to the vendor's logo. Unfortunately, what often works in print, when all tag lines are on a single page, often doesn't work when you only see one line at a time.

In many cases, in the time it takes the banner to flash "Looking for solutions?" then "Tired of boring answers?" then "Seeking a vendor who cares?" I've already clicked onto another page.

2. Dueling banners

Part of the "why sell only one ad when I can sell two in the same space" school of thought, dueling banners are those that involve two companies that split those long horizontal ad spaces at the top of Web pages. This typically leads to much confusion and a certain amount of amusement. All too often, I see the left half promoting 3Com while the right half promotes Cisco - both for the same type of product, both claiming to be the industry leader.

One funny combination I saw recently involved two animated ads (see above) next to each other. The banner on the left was flashing "Looking for Remote Access Routers?" while the ad on the right was showing a 3Com logo. Unfortunately, the ad on the left was by a competitor of 3Com. Just as we know that Web sites can make money by tailoring a vendor's ads to a particular user profile, I also suspect that some sharp ad sales rep somewhere has found a way to sell vendor A, the ability to highlight their ad whenever vendor B's ad is on the same page.

1. Alert Banners

These are perhaps the worst type of ad of all. Rather than display a message from the vendor, they display a warning banner such as "Warning – Internal System Error: Click OK to continue." Of course there is no such error, just a careful ploy to get you to click their banner. Another tricky variation on this involves the Search Banner, where the vendor places a search graphic that looks just like a general search button. I think the reason this ad was mentioned as the worst was that the people I spoke to had been suckered once or twice into believing their systems were, in fact, about to crash.

Now while these may seem to be minor annoyances, some of these ads can play tricks with your network. For example, animated ads or ads that refresh frequently cannot be cached. In some cases you spend more time downloading banner ads than you do actual content (a particular problem on news sites where the actual content is mere text). It's not uncommon to download a few K worth of information and 20-30K worth of banner ads over a minute or two. It's just too big a waste of bandwidth. Next time you think about installing a cache server at your network gateway, just think about how many banner ads will make the cache server useless.

I'm sure there are more types of annoying ads. But I can easily see banner ads accounting for an increasingly high portion of Internet traffic (and thus intranet traffic). Imagine ads that just don't flash, but contain applets (last year, Hewlett-Packard had banner ads with that had a working version of Pong). Just when we thought we had PointCast traffic under control, it turns out that refreshing banner ads are the real culprit.

Too bad the ads are worthless anyway, since, as the vendors keep telling us, they don't have any competition, anyway.