Advertising with Video & Audio?
If you are like me, then you have probably seen about every sort of advertising there is to offer on a website. Although there are some really annoying ones, like the in text mouse-over ads or the dreaded screen full of popup ads that can never quite close, for the most part we have learned to accept advertising as a whole.
Whether you call it Ad Blinders or just acceptance, we have learned to accept the 728×90 in the header and the 300×250 that is off to the side.
What I have yet to really become accustomed to though, is Audio Ads.
I remember when people used to put midi files on the website to play music when you arrived. It was so annoying to be scared to death as I was searching the web half asleep at 2 in the morning or to be at work ‘not surfing the web’ and getting busted by Beethoven.
Then came my first experience with Audio ads… when I moused over a little banner with animated Smileys and had it scream Yipee! at me.
So whenever I have been approached to run audio ads, I had always said Hell No!… but then Video advertising came along.
Video advertising has been shown to be quite effective and so I have been seeing more and more networks offering Video ads that, unfortunately, all auto play. However, with some of the recent networks I have been presented with the video’s audio has been set rather low. So low actually, that I had to turn my speakers up to verify it was actually playing audio at all.
So I am curious what people think about Video ads that auto play with audio? Are they ok if they only play low audio?
I asked the same question on Twitter today and got quite a few responses:
So what do you think?
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3 Responses to “Advertising with Video & Audio?”
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Personally, I do not like auto-play videos because I play my own music when working so it's really not good when I go to a website and the music overlaps. It makes me x-out of the website. But, I might think twice if it's on low audio, at least it's not that loud.
a video can sometime attract more internet users' attention, however the sounds maybe an issue (if you have many tabs open, if you are already listing to music, etc..). I think the users should choose to swith the sound on if they want an ad to "speak to them"- it actually becomes a way to track efficiency of an advert-(track number of viewers+number of viewers switching sounds+ number of click thru).
I think audio ads can be done right, if they are embedded into the stream of an internet radio station or a streaming podcast. Alternatively, if adds are part of a podcast (at the beginning or a sponsored placement / endorsement by the host) I believe they are quite effective.