Audio advertising – the new post display ad frontier
February 25, 2012 3 Comments
I recently noticed some sites going retro to the days of Radio Advertising and applying interesting innovations in that -
The two primary modes I noticed the way websites are deploying this
1) Normal – There is ad being played on the web page with Audio ad along with a static images. A user may or may not be provided with option to stop the ad. Sometimes there is an option to turn off the volume of ad and sometimes users just have to live with the voice ad. They have no option to do anything about that. However this is a very old way of advertising and is not much of innovation.
2) Stealth – These are the kind of audio ads which I recently noticed being used by the sites. They are real innovation ( dunno for good or bad) & are embedded somewhere in the page. The moment the page loads they start playing. Any normal user can’t find the ad on the page since it is hidden. Neither can it be stopped, volume level changed. The web portal manager can guarantee the ad owner with a much higher degree of surety that the message is reached to it audience. One of such sites is rediff.com .
Implications: I am still evaluating how much it can piss off your readers and how much ad dollars it can bring in for web portal/site owner. As a user, though I hated being forced to listen to an ad for female stockings whenever I would try to read news on my favourite news portal. Did I stop using the portal, not really ? Did I get pissed off … yes I did.
So what is the threshold till which an ad rendered stretch their users ? Future of sites like Facebook is all dependent on the answer of this question. Looking forward to see if Facebook also would like to follow audio ads or if the privacy advocates look into this and find an issue worth probing .
