Steve Outing brings up an interesting solution to a problem that not many of us think about: wanting to see an ad that rotated out.
He suggests placing a link that lets you go back and forward through the rotating ads, or a link to an advertiser index.
While I’ve never quite understood the ad index in magazines — I mean I can flip back and forth and find the ad on my own, but I digress — I think it’s a great idea on the Web, especially with a link near an ad spot as Mr. Outing suggests.
Web advertisements often, unfortunately, have one of the weak spots of TV ads, their fleeting nature. You click a new link and the ad you saw is gone, perhaps forever.
Well done TV ads can counter their fleeting nature with the ability to be very compelling and memorable (Waassssup, and its ilk) — something I’ve yet to see Web ads do, though I think the medium is capable of it. The Absolut flash-ad campaign that’s been running on The Onion is the closest thing I’ve found.
Newspapers, on the other hand, don’t have as nearly as compelling ads as TV, but do have stickiness and limited (geographic) targeting capability. The ads in your paper don’t rotate or go away till you round file them.
Web ads can counter with the potential for great targeting, once we get some sort of single sign-on for news sites, but lack permanence and aren’t very compelling, yet.
Providing a way to cycle through the ads, or to visit and index to find the advertiser you just saw, is a step in the right direction.
