Saturday 24 January 2015

Banner Ad turns 20, two most productive hours of the day and Some music for a change

After having a taste of the internet experience whilst at University in the mid 1990's , I finally took the plunge and paid for a dial up subscription to a well known service provider in 1999. It cost £9.99 per month to use and I can remember the number of drop outs when the pages had to load anything that had a lot of animated graphical content. Still, it was an exciting time for me, as I'd also begun to make a sideways move into I.T. as a career option.

The one thing I noticed greatly in the early days when there was only internet explorer and netscape navigator to choose from, was the proliferation of advertising across the top of the screen. Sometimes it was at the bottom, and occasionally on both sides of the screen as well. You'd click on them and be taken to a completely different page. You'd then be asked to fill a form in, or interact in some way, such as buy a product and so on. They were everywhere, and you just became accustomed to them. They were (and still are), known as banner adverts :-

The banner ad turns 20 and is still going strong — but for how long?

Hard to believe it's been 20 years since their arrival. But time flies, and in the last four or five years, smartphone useage has made the life of the banner ad a little difficult. The solution is to go for a full screen advertisement, with the ubiquitous 'reject cross' in the top right of the screen.

I've seen quite a few of them already, whilst using apps ( applications) on my phone and some of them are fantastically annoying, which is a sign of our apathy and/or ingrained neurological response to reject certain styles of push marketing, due to over exposure of the medium. The heady days of 40% plus CTR ( click through rates) of yesteryear, as the article refers to, are long gone, but the upside to that is that advertising companies and departments are now pushed to be more creative in order to get the message across. That's an alchemic art in itself and a topic for another time, but my twenty pence ( or fifty cents?) worth on that would be to keep it simple and bold for maximum impact. And keep it short and sweet for the audio/visual stuff.

By the way, If anyone from advertising or an advertising department is reading this, feel free to drop me a line and ask me for music and sonics. If it's doable, then we'll work something out.

And speaking of work :-

Don’t Waste Your Two Most Productive Hours

In the last few years, after travelling more than I had in the previous decade for work and some playtime here and there, my sleep pattern had become ridiculously erratic. This year, I'd disciplined myself to get up at the same time everyday, and finish about the same time daily, in order to maintain more balance in my work and productivity. And that's what makes me agree wholeheartedly with the notion in the above article.

The first few hours are when I get the most done. That's when I can just start new things and build up a framework of something, and so on. The next four to six hours are when I'm working at finishing, solving and reframing things across the board. All meetings, social stuff and 'time out' web surfing and social media useage happens then, too.

Towards the end of my working day, no matter where I am, I always look out of a window or better still, go outside and just stand there and observe what's happening around me. If I'm already outside, then I find a less busier spot to just 'take five' and sit there or just keep still and let it all out so I can breathe some reflective air in. If I could describe it in musical terms, it'd be like this

And on that note ( or a cluster of them), time out,

For writing/ consultancy related enquiries , email here
   
LINKS TO MY :-   Twitter     
                              Bandcamp
                             






No comments:

Post a Comment