While checking my personal e-mail on Yahoo! today (another) flash overlay advertisement disrupted the simple task that I was trying to do. Sure, this happens now and again but what was different about this one? Well, when I clicked on the ‘close’ button it opened the link to the product that was being advertised in another tab. So, I closed that and clicked ‘close’ again, thinking that I must have made an error and have missed clicking the ‘close’ button the first time (I was clicking ‘close’ quickly in frustration afterall). But no, it did exactly the same thing. While I’m not a fan of pop-up flash advertisements that cause me to be distracted from what I was originally doing, when I click close, I expect the ad to actually close!

The unfortunate thing in this case is that the product that was advertised is actually quite a good deal – Meteor have launched their “Broadband to go” mobile broadband service at a competitive rate in comparison to other operators, namely 3, Vodafone and O2 (although I do think that the current 5GB monthly limit is a bit low). However, perhaps a more unobtrusive ad would have caused me (and other potential customers) to check out the product voluntarily and have brought me to the product web page in a less unhappy and frustrated mood!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Marketing & Advertising, Uncategorized, User Experience. You can keep updated on the conversation by subscribing to the comments feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.