Ectoy2 wrote:
Doug Dohring bought neopets?
I suppose that explains the ads. A former ad-effectiveness analysis man would love ads...
See, that's actually what surprises me so much about the banner ads. Neopets is a company which
exists to sell advertising (and merchandise, of course) and it's run by people who have a lot of past experience in advertising.
So why does the banner ad compaign look like it was organized by a college webmaster who thought to himself, "Self, I need a few banner ads to defray my bandwidth costs" and slapped them up on his site?
Actually, that's not fair -- I've seen sites run by college students with much better ad campaigns than Neopets.
Let's ignore for a moment the pregnancy polls, birth control ads, and the like. What's with the "your child can click here and register with their personal information in hopes of winning a free Ipod, which they naturally won't get" ads, not to mention the, "your child can click here and download spyware on to your computer that will track their Internet usage" ads. Neopets is too high-profile a site for these things not to be noticed sooner or later and there's bound to be trouble when they are.
For a company which exists to sell ads -- and which lavished such attention on their immersive advertising campaigns -- the banner ad campaigns seem singularly badly thought out. Why aren't they going for ads that are more targeted, less obnoxious, and more suitable to a family-friendly site? Why are we getting the exact same generic ad mix you see everywhere else on Internet?
I realize I could be wrong... maybe a great deal of thought went into the banner ads and to the choice of what sorts of content went into the banners. Maybe there are reasons they haven't been more choosy about the sorts of banners that went on the site. But, I have no way of knowing what those reasons might be, and if a lot of thought went into the content of the banners it doesn't show on this end, the user end.
I mean, I block ads at home so I suppose it's really no skin off my back either way. It just seems strange to me that for an advertising-based site the banner ads seem so much like an afterthought.