Advocating the Interstitial: How Transitional Ads Can Rewrite Your Direct Marketing Playbook
I have been an advocate of interstitials (or transitional ads) for about 3 years now. Numerous reports have shown that not only are they more effective than pop-ups/pop-unders, but they are also considered far less annoying by the user. Here is a graphic from a September 2004 eMarketer reportc comparing effectiveness of interstitials over pop-ups/unders. (click on thumbnail for larger image)
What other types of ad format affords major advertisers with the best of both worlds? We are in a day when you can go to a site and the publisher has loaded four or five different ads on each page. It becomes very easy for the marketer’s message to get lost among all the content and the competing ads.
Interstitials provide the advertiser with a very powerful medium since they are delivering their message when they have the user’s full and undivided attention. Since I have been preaching the use of interstitials as a powerful and effective ad format, it has been interesting to see the evolution and acceptance of the ad format. The general sentiment on the format is still a bit misunderstood though.
The single most common response I hear from advertisers and agencies alike is that interstitial ads are great for branding and not so great for direct response marketing. I believe that this common misconception is due, in part, to the timed nature of the ads. I believe that many people liken the ad format to that of a television commercial because much like a TV commercial, the ad appears for a set amount of time and then goes away.
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