iFarce Ads

Last week I was working on a pitch.

As with all pitches, indeed all presentations these days, there was the dreaded Deliverables List. You know, the menu of items that must be presented so that all parties in the room, including the cellar dwellers of the corporate hierarchy, feel they are important and a key member of the AOR selection team.

You see, the critical branding and re-positioning of a client can be just right, but if, god forbid, you walk into that room without a mobile ad to see how it works on a smartphone screen, well that's just so 2003.

Every once in a while I need to refresh myself on the constantly changing nomenclature for ads these days.

Display Ads.
Native ads.
Rollover ads.
Page takeovers, rich media 236 X 74 boxed skyscraper ads.
Damn you media people.
Isn't it enough that you get all those free coffee mugs, T-shirts and tickets to baseball games, why do you have to make my life a living three-page-long-deliverables-list hell?

Anyway, when my art director partner came to me at the last minute panicked because we didn't have a mobile ad to put on page 194 of the deck, naturally I had to ask for clarification.

And there it is in the picture above.
A two and 1/2 inch wide banner standing all of 3/8 of an inch high.

You have got to be shitting me!

I don't like to come off as some naive dinosaur but I didn't even know they were putting ads, or that they even had a special name, on the webpages I occasionally browse on my iPhone. My partner pointed out that they had been doing them for years.

Which means I have unwittingly ignored them for years.

Why would I be looking at an ad on my phone when my wife just texted me that the toilet in the guest bathroom is painting the floor with last night's dinner?

I read recently that less than 1 in 1,000,000,000*  people actually click through full sized banners placed on a web site. Leading me to believe that are actually more people "ideating", creating, designing and posting mobile ads, than there are people actually clicking on mobile ads.

Oh, the humanity.


* Data gleaned from The Siegel Institute of Fictional Statistics and Common Sense