Re: Google are cunts
It seems a given now that if you want to get results, you need really obnoxious ads that do all of the things that print ads never could.
For me, if your ad leaves a bad taste in my mouth that's the impression I have of your company. I don't return.
I am more likely to respond to a plain text ad (maybe with a photo of the product) than I am to anything distracting. It's trivial to make the content flow around the ad. A site can have a pool of advertisers with a bit of PHP to display an add on a page at random, and you can make a simple counter internal to the server to tell how often an add has been loaded. The advertising client could provide their own picture if they really wanted their own counter, but it must be static and not distracting form the content.
I'm teaching people to look for cached/archived versions of pages instead of allowing the ads to inhibit content, and teaching people that there's a couple of big alternatives to companies who annoy you with ads - 1) their competition probably has an equivalent product and 2) maybe you don't actually need it anyway.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
