SMH shows how to make a home page takeover work
When you’re a commercial organisation, balancing the needs of consumers with the need to make money through ads is tricky.
Among the organisations that sometimes goes the wrong way in my view is Fairfax, with its autostart video ads, for instance.
But today, a bit of unreserved praise for the home page takeover currently running on smh.com.au for American Express.
It appears to be frequency capped at one impression so it’s not going to be too intrusive for readers, and I suspect that the cut-through will be big.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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why would a user would be happy with this? they come to read the news and get a big annoying irrelevant ad ruining the page as soon as they enter.
not sure it’s a fair trade off.
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I’ve got some fairly curmudgeonly views about page takeovers, but I suspect that the point is not to make a user happy. It’s to command a few seconds of the user’s attention without pissing them off. And in that respect, people’s browsing habits aren’t going to be shifted by one intrusive takeover ad. I can’t think of a reason why Fairfax would turn this one down… I hated it, but I’ll still be back at their site at least once before the end of work today.
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It certainly made me unhappy and I won’t be back today (although I will be hitting up the mobile site). I don’t even know what the ad was for.
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Traveller,
Given the choice between experiencing high impact advertising for ten seconds or a pay wall, which would you choose?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
All the homepage takeover haters would obviously be happier to hit the SMH page and enter their credit card details instead .
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Pay walls vs takeovers?? What a cop out argument.
Are you homepage takeover fanboys saying you cant acheive big impact without pissing the user off, and starting some annoying animation just before I’m about to click on a story?
I didn’t even hang around long enough to look at what the ad was about- just looked straight for the X.
Yeah… What cut through!
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Hey Tim. I would choose neither. The Internet (still) has a rich source of free news sites and I’d take my business elsewhere.
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Hi Traveller,
But what are your thoughts on how those “free news sites” will afford to bring you that news in the long term? Either somebody pays for it or in the end, it goes away.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Tim – if paywalls hit you can bet your house Fairfax will still be serving up these over the page executions to users, regardless of whether they’re opening their wallets.
Never have I heard anyone talking paywalls talk about less advertisements. If anything they will want to charge MORE CPM as there will be a flimsy argument around improved user quality.
And I bet the way the ad is tracked someone will be claiming x/close button clicks as legitimate click through.
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Hey Tim
It will be interesting to see what happens to ABC/BBC if the whole online news world goes pay. They are currently my preferred source of online news (with SMH as I am from Sydney).
General news has been shown to not work on a pay to view model as there are too many other alternatives. Pending Murdoch convincing all the news outlets to charge, of course.
Niche news site like AFR and WSJ work well because they are the only source.
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From a digital creative perspective I feel it fails, simply because the takeover doesn’t allow the current news areas to fall over. Therefore the idea fails. Seeing the switch to some old/alternative content before the wall falls feels awkward.
This is why you don’t see many concepts doing anything with the news areas that is this specific or tied to the current content. It’s too hard to achieve plus make the execution look 100% quality.
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It got my attention. I was facinated enough to sit through it without hitting the close button.
The downside is I cannot remember the advert and would seriously consider clicking the close button second time around.
It would add to cost, but an advert that evolved and offered something new to capture and hold one’s attention each day might be worth the investment in the longer term.
One could definitely do some cool things with the space.
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i agree with Tim – it got my attention and was short enough to withstand viewing. Amex have also done well with their creative SMH DBS print ads.
Those born before 1980 are well aware that nothing in the world comes for free, including news. While the payment model for news is taking a while to sort itself out, Tim’s right – someone has to pay for real news to be gathered as opposed to scraped, linked or stolen. In the end this will be the user – one way or another.
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I like it, but I can’t help but think a bit of better branding would’ve helped – I’m in the industry and it took me a while to realise Amex where the client.
And this is surely better than those “please look at this advert for 5 seconds until your page loads” kind of things. And plus points for the frequency capping – so those people who are saying “they won’t go back today”, well what’s the point in that? You’ve already done your single view of the ad.
8/10
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Found it a clever idea, but too intrusive for my taste.
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Have you ever known Fairfax to frequency cap? Not only is it poor creative execution, it keeps on giving, every time I go back to the home page…..all part of the race to the bottom. The term “creative” should be licenced, and granted only when its true meaning is fulfilled.
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Very much agree with OzDean – if the concept can’t be executed perfectly, don’t do it.
Apart from that, IMO takeovers are not a positive way to get users to consider your brand. Web browsing is a fast-paced exercise and the last thing you want to do is interrupt a user’s activities by taking away control of the browser, then show them a big shiny logo of the company that just pissed them off and wasted their time.
The element of ‘surprise’ is why users don’t remember what the ad was about. The ad is over before they have had a chance to consider the message. But I wonder if, after being so rudely interrupted, they have a subconscious negative emotion toward that brand?
There are far more positive ways of using animation and flash to create ads that people want to view and indeed interact with. Give users a positive, unobtrusive experience and I guarantee you, while your CTR might not be as “impressive”, the quality of your leads certainly will – and you won’t have a negative impact on perception of the brand. Your message will also be absorbed better because you have gained the users voluntary attention and they are therefore prepared for, and receptive of, your offer.
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check back in 3 days with everyone who visited the SMH site today and lets see the unaided/aided recall for this ad
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Don’t even bother looking at pop up ads like this so I agree that the cut-through is poor. Understand that money needs to be made from online advertising but this is a really poor way to do it…all is does is piss me off and send me to a site like the ABC for the news…
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From a publisher POV I’d take an intrusive OTP over a production-heavy integration any day
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Sweet advertorial.
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Yeah, I clicked the x, and then left. No idea what the ad was for until I read this. Now I now to avoid Amex. Cheers!
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This was a good one ? really ?? The fold down news was old, and i’m not sure what the tents had to do with signing up for an Amex Card. I asked a room of 26 people today if they’d seen it and could remember the brand, almost all had been annoyed by it, but only 1 person remembered the brand. SMH annoyed everyone, and the advertiser didn’t seem likely to sign up many additional members.
If publishers are looking for interruption style advertising combined with the paywalls to be their silver bullet, they’d better hope that news outlets like the ABC and the BBC get shut down pretty soon. Since the SMH started auto-starting their 30 second bits of video that are preceded by 30 second ads, i’ve moved most of my news consumption to either the ABC or blogs (for sport). Interruption models, forced pre-roll videos and auto-refresh aren’t the answer for revenue – unfortunately i don’t know what is, maybe it is the paywall – but if newspapers don’t get smart soon, they’re going to have few customers to convert, and fewer advertisers to pay for the ads.
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Hi Mike Zed,
Actually, I must admit that I missed the fact that it was old news on the fold down.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Sorry I missed this discussion at the time, especially the opinions of ANON333, Traveller, MikeZed and Amy. I am always hungry for news but recently found myself actually picking up a newspaper rather than facing another website like SMH.com.au. (Then I remembered I live in WA and flung the horrible thing down before it scarred me.) After reading these opinions, however, I am now wondering if news sites are using tactics like page takeovers to annoy customers back to printed copy?
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If the creative agency had used Page Morph technology (from Eyewonder, but with a similar product offering from Eyeblaster), which takes a screenshot live and then interacts with it, this would have been much more effective. Lazy creative/technology used.
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I like Morph too, Jeff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSMRPKM1evk
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