Guidelines for online rich media ads
Via Biz-Community: The IAB issues guidelines for online rich media ads
The US-based IAB has issued guidelines for rich media ads that are designed to simplify the online ad planning and buying process. Over 30 of the leading online publishers, representing 65% of total advertising inventory are or plan to be in compliance with these guidelines.
The article goes on to mention the list of 40+ companies that are or plan to be compliant. So if you didn't already, you now know which domains and media dimensions to block using your favourite ad-blocking Firefox extension(s). Ha! Suckers.
Following up on their wonderful (look for my sarcasm) "approach life differently" television ad campaign, Nedbank now have the perfect website to match. I'd like to pull it apart when I find the time, but right now all I can say is that they have a tremendous amount to learn about providing their users with a website that is both usable and accessible. Placing a 360kb flash file (which reloads on every visit due to it's random nature) at the top of the site containing hybrid television/radio advertising is in my mind one of the most useless applications of flash technology I've ever encountered. Sitting on a broadbank connection, they still haven't loaded by the time I've clicked on a link to navigate to a new page - rendering them completely useless despite that the content they contain was useless to begin with.
It makes me cringe at how their Access to Information footer link
a) Launches in an inaccessibly-linked Javascript popup window,
b) The popup window isn't resizeable,
c) The content is an Acrobat PDF document, for which a plug-in is required, though no mention of this is made beforehand.
And they're probably not aware that their "invisible" clickStream graphic (for measuring site traffic) at the bottom of their site contains their dev.nedbank.co.za (broken link) URL.
I won't even get started on their cross-browser compliancy.
I've linked to Nedbank before on my very outdated evangelism page and simply couldn't resist the opportunity to pull it apart - again. Full review will appear here soon.
As for Old Mutual, who missed making it onto my hall of shame list, even though their website is developed exclusively for an Internet Explorer 5.5 and 800x600 screen resolution setup - who cares that the homepage "took 0.000 seconds to download" ?
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3 Comments
MWEB, that warning goes out to you too.
Oh how I do love the MWEB site these days. Using Flash to emulate regular underlined hyperlinks for their navigation where basic CSS rollovers would suffice (see a menu item homepage). And it’s one big banner ad – or in my case, a page full of white holes. ;)
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15 March 2004
warrenski11:53 pm
As for Old Mutual, you may or may not know that they operate exclusively on Microsoft-based software. Sure, it’s no real excuse, but they are so entrenched in the stuff, that they know no better – and I doubt they even care. Quite sad really.
Give them – and other companies – a few more years to correct their sites, and pity the fools that don’t heed the Web Standards movement – they will be the ones fighting for their survival, in what I think will become the .Com v2.0 meltdown.