Archive: Opinions

An article on the Daily Beast Web site had an embedded video of Fox News's Megan Kelly on The Tonight Show, talking about how she got Donald Trump to agree to interview him.  I found it on my iPad via the Apple News app (or was it the Facebook app?) and thought it would be interesting, given the very public, nasty fued between Trump and Kelly.  I started playing it, but a video advertisement started playing at the same time.  It scrolled my screen to the top so I would watch the ad, but I couldn't see the video I was watching.  The volume of the ad drowned out the sound of the video I was trying to watch.  There was no way to pause, mute or X-out the video ad (I have since found one on the computer version of the site, though not visible or obvious).  I scrolled back down and paused my video until the ad completed.  I then restarted the video only to be interrupted repeatedly by more loud video ads.

And here's the thing -- I was so frantically focussed on trying to figure out how to watch my video that I have no idea what those video ads were touting.  The outcome was that I probably won't read The Daily Beast any more, the video ads were entirely ineffective, and I didn't get to see the video that attracted me to the site in the first place (which, by the way, was posted on other sites, so it wasn't by any means exclusive content).  Lose-lose-lose.

The Web is the latest medium to become so wildly enthusiastic about advertising revenue that it has lost any kind of sensible implementation.  The reason I started getting my news from the Internet in the first place is a chain of technological and strategic ad gaffes spanning multiple media.

I stopped reading newspapers (printed on paper) when the advertising started to overwhelm the content, and news and opinion became blurred, and news itself just wasn't there very much.  Today the Washington Post doesn't make any bones about slamming Donald Trump any time they have a chance.  Not that I am a Trump fan myself.  But you expect newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post that used to have good reputations for generally unbiassed reporting to keep their opinions on the editorial pages, and not be so liberal with them on the news pages.  I don't care what their opinions are.  I want them to present the facts so I can form opinions of my own.  A long time ago I heard a rumor that this is how journalism is supposed to work.

So I switched to television news.  I watched it during the half hour I took for lunch.  But there were so many commercials and opinion pieces and pundits that I was lucky to squeeze even a few minutes of actual news out of a half hour.  Again, these media outlets, the major news networks, were filled with so much opinion -- don't you just hate all those shouting pundits? though even the anchors have a lot to say about what they think, as if we care what they think -- that I was hard pressed to see the main stories of the day in my half hour, even when I programmed my remote to cycle from Headline News to CNN to Fox News to MSNBC and back.  Although the networks will deny it, I am sure they coordinate things so they show all those commercials at the same time, making it pointless to change the channel during the commercials.

And those TV popup ads, usually at the bottom of the screen, often cover up the news scroll, making it impossible to even get your news that way (if it hasn't made you crosseyed to read the news scroll that is competing for your attention with the talking heads above it).  They are distracting and obfuscating.

So I switched to Internet news.  That was fine at first, but soon the popup ads and various ad formats became so invasive that the pages I tried to read would reload half way through the first paragraph, resizing so I couldn't find where I left off, and sometimes not providing a way to close the popups, making it literally impossible to read the articles.

Or how about those articles that say contine on the next page?  There is an arrow to click, but before the real arrow is an ad with a fake arrow that will take you to an advertiser's site.  How does being interupted by being tricked make me feel positively toward the site or the product?  Do I care enough to go back and finish the article?  I really don't.

The ads on a single page compete for your attention.  That is the nature of advertising, whether it's printed on newsprint, showing on TV, or on a Web page.  The advertising specialists (also known as idiots) who think that competing for attention means popping up, flashing, showing a video with loud sound, and so on to the detriment of actually experiencing the content that attracted readers or viewers in the first place, have lost any vestige of common sense.  In short - if you so screw up the reason people come to your media outlet that they can't use it, they're going to stop coming there.

I think Jack Benny got it right.  Benny integrated the ads into his show, using the cast to tout the products.  He made running gags and bits around the ads, so the audience felt in on the in-jokes.  When the Sportsmen quartet sang about Lucky Strike cigarettes, or announcer Don Wilson waxed enthusiastically about Jello and Benny became increasingly annoyed, you felt like part of it, and it felt like part of the show.  And you always remembered Lucky Strikes and Jello, and talked about the bits afterward.  That is the effect an ad is supposed to have if it is well done.  Obviously I can't write about how delicious Jello is in the middle of a news story, but you get the idea.  There are ways to make the advertising effective without irritating your audience.

I edit and write for a newspaper, so I am well aware that the articles are a way to lure you gentle readers to a place where you will see ads, which happens to pay the bills (well, that's the way it's supposed to work).  When done properly it can be a win-win-win situation.  You get to read scintillating stories -- well, stories, anyway -- for free, advertisers get to reach a local market that is appropriate and exciting for their businesses, and and I get to get paid.

There are sites that take a reasonable approach to the ads they display, and I gravitate to those.  I like sites that allow me to enlarge the text, and that allow me to actually read the articles.  I am more likely to look at the ads on these sites because I am not being bombarded with so much junk that my attention span is shattered.

As for that page on the Daily Beast -- There was a clip of the interview in that Tonight Show video, but I couldn't hear a word Trump said over the noise of the video ad.  Before that happened I had tried to picture anyone successfully drowning out Donald Trump in any medium, and I couldn't.  Now I guess I can.

I can't even imagine the amount of money these sites are raking in for displaying the cacophonies of advertising they publish.  But you have to think that as they lose readership the advertisers themselves will realize that nobody cares what the ads are for, or if they do readers will so resent them that they will boycott the products and services advertised.

Or not.  Common sense is less common than advertised.

v12i20