Ad Blobs: Something Different
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Summary: An attempt to mitigate the effects from box blindness
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One reason Internet advertising has such low clickthrough rates is that most people naturally skip over anything that looks like an ad. Below is an example of an ad blob. At first glance it does not look like a typical rectangular-shaped banner ad, and I designed it to mitigate the effects from the phenomenon known as banner blindness so that you don't subconsciously glance past it and might instead pause for a second to notice.
Someone recently e-mailed me a link to Jakob Nielsen's April 21, 2003 Alertbox column entitled "Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?". In the section entitled, "From Banner Blindness to Box Blindness?", he says, "users might also develop box blindness, ignoring little text boxes just as they've long ignored banner-shaped areas of the screen." While I had not read this article, this was exactly my theory and motivation for creating the ad blobs. They were designed simply to camouflage the ad's rectangular shape so that users don't naturally ignore them.
However, Google sent me e-mail saying that displaying AdSense ads with curved borders violates AdSense policies in that the curved borders draw undue attention to the ads. To comply with Google policies, I changed the format of the ads on this site to a white background and no border. It appears that displaying ads with no borders (boxes) is as actually more effective than displaying ads with curved borders, and both are more effective than boxes. So it appears that Jakob's theory of users eventually developing box blindness has some merit.
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, Jakob's partner at the Nielsen Norman Group, sent me e-mail that said, "Actually, [box blindness] was not a theory, it was the result of a test using eye-tracking to see where people were actually looking."
Ad Blob HTML Code
<div align="center">
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr><td colspan="3" valign="bottom" align="right"><img
src="/images/blob-top.gif" alt="Ads by Google"
width="796" height="45"></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top"><img src="/images/blob-left.gif"
alt="Ads by Google" width="33" height="91"></td>
<td height="90" width="729" bgcolor="#ECF8FF" align="right">
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-8167994427157398";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
google_ad_format = "728x90_as";
google_ad_channel = "5718963601";
google_color_border = "ECF8FF";
google_color_bg = "ECF8FF";
google_color_link = "3366FF";
google_color_url = "008000";
google_color_text = "6F6F6F";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</td><td align="left" valign="top"><img
src="/images/blob-right.gif" alt="Ads by Google"
width="36" height="91"></td></tr>
<td colspan="3" valign="top">
<a href="http://jamesthornton.com/writing/ad-blobs.html"><img
src="/images/blob-bottom.gif" border="0"
width="796" height="39" alt="Ad Blobs"></a>
</td></tr>
</table>
</div>
Ad Blob Images
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