Brilliance. This, by far, was my favorite Super Bowl commercial this time around. Apparently there are more of these as well.

What do you think? Did you have a favorite Super Bowl commercial?

Joshua Porter wrote a great post about why social ads don’t work, and he raises great points further think about.

Social ads don’t work as well because people are being social, not searching for something.

This is spot on. Think of one time you were browsing your social network of choice and thought about clicking an ad? For me it’s extremely rare, and I’d imagine that a large percentage of other people feel the same. Ads seems to work much better on sites where your attention span isn’t required for long. Social sites don’t support this model. You can spend hours browsing profiles and interacting with the site, so force feeding ads won’t work because they are not within context of the users habits on the site. It’s like invading personal space. Have you ever had someone knock on your door trying to sell something, while you’re watching tv?

Search sites (like Yahoo, Google, etc.) are a little different, which seems to be why their ads are more effective. People are looking for something specific. When the results are displayed, they are either seeing relevant ads, or relevant search results. It’s within context. The user clicks the ad or result, then leaves.

News portals might fall between social sites and search sites, however, I’d say with user habits, they’re closer to social networking sites. I would imagine your average user goes to a news site to read news and/or just browse headlines.

But certainly search sites aren’t the only types of places where online advertising can work, so where else does this online advertising model fit in? How can more companies get a ROI on the millions of dollars being spent for online ads and stay within context of users habits per site? I don’t really have an answer for that one, but as the web is still new, there is lots to learn for advertisers, as well as those displaying ads on their sites.

It seems that there is still a huge market, and tons of money to be spent to make online more effective and useful than it has already been. But how can online advertising get bigger with more innovation? Well, it certainly won’t come from the likes of Google, Microsoft, and others. They can only set up the platform to be spread out across a vast amount of people. Innovation will have to come from creative agencies. It takes more than a crappy ad and a company logo.

Consumers may not be creative, but they’re not stupid. Via

With using platforms like Google it is becoming easier to target niche audiences, which should make the job a little easier for agencies to be more innovative to grab the attention of it’s users. It will be interesting to see how online advertising continues to perform, because it seems that there is tons of room for growth.

I came across this site which showcases some very forward-thinking online advertisements, that have made me curious about the company behind them. This site also made me want to write this post.

There are plenty of examples of great innovation and creativity, that don’t seem like they would disrupt the user experience, but rather add to it, granted the niche is very focused.

This reminds of me text/instant messaging as well. But, great ads from Chase.

The easy answer to that would be no, because users go to sites for a specific reason: to get the information that they were looking for. I personally do not like most advertising on the web, unless it is very tastefully done, and does not distract me from getting the information I need. Google Adwords seems to me, to be the most simple form of this kind of advertising, and I can’t say that I’ve been distracted with them while browsing websites. It is not distracting, and has proved to be very effective.

Then there are other sites that seem to be dominated by ads, and it takes away from the overall experience. Now with a site like Techcrunch that makes around $70k a month from advertising, it would be hard to say no to advertisers, but at least don’t make it look like the advertising is more important than the content.

I can’t say that advertising does not belong on the web overall, however, there are certain places on the web where I just can’t stand seeing ads, and that is on personal blogs. If I am going to someone’s personal blog, I don’t need to see ads about ‘blogs’ and ‘custom web design’ or whatever. I want to read what is on that person’s mind. It’s amazing to see how many personal blogs are out there, dominated by Adwords. It immediately makes me think that they are in it for the money. It’s disappointing that it has attracted so many worthless bloggers just because they can easily “make money online”.

I will never have ads on my site. Maybe I’m just biased, but I’ve just never been a fan of seeing advertising on the web especially with blogs, and it seems that some sites just go overboard. I hate seeing design ruined by ads, and I’m sure I’m not the only person that feels that way. There has to be a better way to advertise on the web!