Yes, I have an opinion on these and its quite strong. I very much dislike banner ads. VERY much. And just to clarify, the ads that sit on the right side of the page that are just an images you can click on if you choose are not a problem and not what I’m talking about.

I am talking about the banner ads that can be placed anywhere on the webpage and that can jump out, start playing frighteningly annoying music, and take over your screen just from the natural movment of your mouse. I am not a designer, I’m a marketer and if I’m putting an ad out, I never, ever, EVER want it to turn people off to the brand. Period.

Take just a sample scenario: You search for something in Google and get the first page of 10 results. You click on one of the sites and as soon as your’re on the homepage, things start flying on your screen. You try to close them, but those little “X”s are completely difficult to click on. What do you do? Why, hit the “Back” button, of course. You have a long list of other sites that matched your search you can go right back to.

This is one perspective and this is solely from the point of view of the customer/visitor. The thing is, it most hurts the site who is getting paid to have the advertising. Not only is the visitor not clicking on the ad, but he is not even staying on the site. Both parties lose, in my opinion, and the potential customer is checking out your competitor.

I did have a completely different perspective raised by one of my peers, who was looking more at the analytics and measuring success of interactive banner ads versus static ads. She pointed out that getting someone on a site to interact in some way with an innovative banner ad can be more valuable than simply getting website impressions from a regular ad.

I don’t disagree with this completely, but am just unable to get past the fact that people will leave a site because of an annoying banner. And to all the designers, I’m sorry, but if people bounce out of a site or don’t click on the interactive ad, I don’t care how cool and neat and awesome it is. It’s not going to lead to any conversions. Thoughts?