New Flash Ad Kit for DoubleClick
Perhaps I'm late noticing this, but Macromedia has released a new DoubleClick Flash Ad Kit to speed development of rich media advertising. Kit installs a number of publishing templates to Flash to quickly build all those popping, floating, expanding, annoying-as-hell Flash-based advertisements (ones I thankfully never see because of my browser of choice).
But because these spawns of Satan are a common task for most Flash developers, the kit does help alleviate the complexity of hooking Flash into DoubleClick's DART motif (who came up that name?). There's also a gallery of template examples, and an overview video presenting the broad concepts of the system.
The best part of the video -- for me anyway -- comes when the narrator describes "floating Flash ads" and encourages developers to "cut through the clutter" by layering their Flash ads over the page. Surely she's not implying the actual content of a page is clutter...right?
Comments
I guess we are very lucky since we don't have to deal with Doubleclick for business... It would be interesting to see where's a survey of sorts (besides Doubleclick's claims) among common web users that shows people actually *want* to have their browser assaulted by in-your-face, invasive ads crawling around their screen. Or perhaps it is just us developers who always get all grumpy about this issue while everyone else kind of likes it... oh well.
Posted by: beto at February 9, 2004 11:24 AM
...yeah, i love my browser being hijacked so much that my Hosts file is filled to the brim with lots of DoubleClick addresses that all point to 127.0.0.1 and the few that make it past that get filtered out by the AdBlocker extension in my copy of Firefox.
I'll stick with filing anything to do with DoubleClick right up there with offers for penis enlargement or instant riches from our friends in Nigeria :)
Posted by: Joshua at February 9, 2004 12:35 PM
It would be nice if flash developers who find themselves required to create browser window satan-spawning would all secretly add an easter egg that would disable pop-up/under if the user has a pre-agreed cookie loaded. Something simple like bugme=not. I find it depressing that the pop over/under and the overtake-window-content advertising techniques are effective enough to warrant continued creation.
Posted by: Nate at February 9, 2004 1:12 PM
Todd said: (ones I thankfully never see because of my browser of choice)
Do you have an ad blocker installed, or does Safari automatically block Flash ads? I'm using Safari with Pith Helmet installed, and the only advertising that occasionally slips by is in javascript format. The web is so much cleaner and easier to read without all the frenetic neon.
Posted by: Dusty at February 9, 2004 2:15 PM
I use firebird
I dont have any problems with devil spawn ( popup advertising ) anymore.
has anyone else found that the new version of firefox doesnt have scroll bars?
could just be my copy of it
Posted by: Benjamin at February 9, 2004 7:04 PM
Ben- It's a problem with your theme, not Firefox. Uninstall your themes and try downloading them again. Some of them may not be compatible yet.
Posted by: David at February 10, 2004 4:28 PM
