E-Media Tidbits

Tom Hespos wrote something in his MediaPost column yesterday that's worth pondering: "If you're advertising on a site where people tend to rapidly get in and get out, your ad has to move quickly to get to the point. Animations that take 10 seconds to unfold simply aren't going to work here. ... We cannot assume that simply because an ad is rendered in a browser that it has done its job."

That's for sure. And Poynter's recently released Eyetrack III study hammered in that point. Ten seconds for an animated website ad to play out? Any advertiser who takes that creative approach is living a fantasy.

As we observed in Eyetrack when we looked at website banner advertising, the typical amount of time that people spend looking at an ad is usually less than a second -- when it's viewed at all. It varies based on ad content, size, and placement, but even the biggest ads only got a second and a half of viewing time in our study.

And here's another Eyetrack observation that speaks to Hespos' point: We noticed that animated ads sometimes did a better job of initially drawing the eye, but that static banner ads performed as well or better in terms of length of eye viewing and number of eye fixations (very brief pauses of the eye to take in information). The point: People didn't pause their eyes long enough to see the full ad animations.