When Animated Banner Ads Suck

By Dennis D. McDonald

Before you proclaim the ascendancy of community orientation, audience engagement, shared innovation, and online social partnership, you need to realize that good old contempt-for-the-customer is alive and kicking.

Thanks to Google Chrome’s inability (unwillingness?) to block animated ads, my eyes were recently drawn to this banner ad (this is a static screen shot; click it to display the full size image):

It took me a while to understand the message. At first I thought the little figures were spiders. Then I saw they were human figures as the image zoomed in. What I thought at first was the drumming of fingers is actually manipulation-as-marionette by remote strings.

That’s what this product is supposed to enable you to do — treat your customers like puppets?

If that’s the intention, someone at Adobe hasn’t gotten the message about social media and collaboration and is continuing with the same old “let’s see what we can make our customers do” schtick.

I guess I know what the metrics for this ad are — and they don’t have anything to do with actual purchasing behavior or customer satisfaction. Maybe that’s what’s intended.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Dennis D. McDonald