Just noticed that Siemens bought the entire background at The Huffington Post. A click anywhere in the blue (outside the bounds of the content section I’ve faded to black below) will take you to a Siemens landing page.
So they aren’t just buying the background display, they are buying any clicks outside the content area. I wonder how many accidental clicks they’re getting and how much THP is charging for a full background buy. And I wonder who pitched the idea — the publisher or the advertiser. Have you ever seen this on another site before?
Jason Fried wrote this on Sep 23 2009 There are 74 comments.
Anonymous Coward 23 Sep 09
Honestly, I haven’t seen many ads at all since installing AdBlock Plus for FireFox a few years ago.
Anonymous Coward 23 Sep 09
collegehumor.com has something very similar
Mark 23 Sep 09
Of course, the Siemens of now is not the Siemens of then…but some history is hard to shake (and some histories are never told)
Charles Parsons 23 Sep 09
It’s still rare to see this on larger news-based sites, but we’re beginning to see it in local news (especially TV) and it is pretty common in the gaming world. Some sites opt for the clickable outside area, some don’t.
Andy 23 Sep 09
break.com does it all the time, generally for movie premieres, and the content is somewhat relevant. This is … out of sorts.
Dario Vasconcelos 23 Sep 09
TheSuperficial.com does this from time to time and I’ve got to say, I’ve accidentally clicked it many times, it’s a web developer tic, I guess.
fumbling around 23 Sep 09
The gossip blog JustJared.com does this. Dictionary.com does this all the time. MG Siegler at TechCrunch recently posted about Dictionary.com and many users preferred the one-big-ad thing over 12 small ad blocks sitting in the right sidebar.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/dictionarycom-now-a-giant-web-billboard-your-ad-here/
Joe W 23 Sep 09
As above, CollegeHumor.com has been doing this for some time.
They’ve even started doing product-related comedy videos, with the target product in the outside area:
Guy buys condoms skit – NWS to be safe
huphtur 23 Sep 09
Jason, you need to “get out more”. This is pretty common practice. Check out MacLife’s site right now.
Dylan 23 Sep 09
huphtur has written my favourite comment on this blog ever.
VM 23 Sep 09
Something like that is quite popular. Usually they lead to a page quite unrelated to the message displayed in ad
http://img.skitch.com/20090923-xp2hbmj15by9t39qk44ppskrnh.png
dan 23 Sep 09
http://www.todaysbigthing.com does it.
brad 23 Sep 09
SFGate tried this a little while ago:
http://twitter.com/bradmeador/status/3847954159
Daragh 23 Sep 09
The Hype Machine (hypem.com) does this too. Coke sponsors it at at the moment. I didn’t realise that it was a clickthrough though until I saw this post.
Chuck 23 Sep 09
This is pretty common on celebrity gossip sites. Perez Hilton actually has it listed with his standard advertising rates. Pretty rare on a more “serious” site like The Huffington Post.
Chris 23 Sep 09
consign on hypem.com, its annoying when you click it by accident. i have a habit of always clicking on backgrounds compulsively to always make sure im in the “active” window. really annoying bad habit.
Colin 23 Sep 09
French newspaper Liberation ( www.liberation.com ) is doing the same background-stuff some time to time, started several months ago.
i haven’t checked for the click to be honest.
Colin 23 Sep 09
incidently there is this type of campaign today ! yes the background is clickable
Felix 23 Sep 09
@Mark Siemens is more than 150 years old. Don’t reduce a whole companies existence to the twelve darkest years of the 20th century.
chriskalani 23 Sep 09
Just on college humor… rather annoying.
David 23 Sep 09
Honestly, I don’t recall a time I’ve ever had to be so careful as to not land on semens.
Matt Lincoln Russell 23 Sep 09
I’ve seen it fairly frequently in the tech sites I frequent, but more common is to have some sort of skin/theme going down the sides too to make it clear its all part of the advert. (not just a different color)
Kahlil 23 Sep 09
Over at http://www.spiegel.de they have been doing that since years. It’s a very successful german news site.
leff 23 Sep 09
pandora and last.fm do it constantly on their browser based player pages. I can’t stand to look at either without adblock.
Andreas 23 Sep 09
It seems to be used on German sites quite a bit. See http://www.kicker.de/ for example.
Dave Sparks 23 Sep 09
Interesting, something I’ve never seeen before but no doubt gets lots of accidental clicks. Could certainly be irritating.
KrazyCeltic 23 Sep 09
I’ve seen an advertiser purchase an entire background before, such as at www.cbssports.com (and the edges/background of the page is static so when you scroll down to view additional content the advertisement does not move), but I had not seen this clickable attribute yet for anything other than the banner.
Vindexus 23 Sep 09
It’s pretty common on video game sites. Not sure if they’re clickable backgrounds though; I’m pretty sure most aren’t.
EH 23 Sep 09
If anything, these comments are an interesting compendium of sites that i’ve heard of but never had a reason to visit. You know, collegehumor or break once in a while when fwd’ed, but really more of a cross-section of the mainstream. Regardless of whether you think of yourself as mainstream, the advertisers have already targeted you as such.
Alex 23 Sep 09
Yes, in Germany you see this often – very stupid idea.
Joe Grossberg 23 Sep 09
@Mark:
Same with Bayer, which had an executive sentenced by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Volkswagen was literally founded and run by the Nazi party. And IBM has a whole book documenting their sordid involvement in Germany’s ruthlessly efficient genocide: http://is.gd/3BI8r Those numbers tattooed on the arms of concentration camp victims? IDs for use with IBM computers.
As to the degree to which Siemens et al. should be tainted my their malfeasance a half century later, I’m not sure. But when Hitler wanted to kill every Jew in Europe, there were no shortage of companies willing to help and Siemens was one of the most prominent participants.
AlexFoe 23 Sep 09
I saw this type of ad in early 2008 (i think…might have been even earlier) on this site: http://www.gamereactor.dk
Not soon after they decided to sacrifice their entire entrypage…. they MUST be getting som big buxx for this kind of ad.
Personally i don’t mind the full background ads, but the entrypage ad is lame :-(
wes 23 Sep 09
You can add MySpace to the list.
Kaanon 23 Sep 09
We do this all the time on our sites. It’s good money and I personally like it, because it doesn’t really interfere with the content of the site. Personally, it’s my favorite type of Ad, since it’s actually noticeable.
RP 23 Sep 09
Tons of content sites do this. I actually find it refreshing, since it doesn’t take up any content space.
HP 23 Sep 09
Seen it just about a month ago on a dutch news site http://www.nu.nl, add for the national lottery. Entire background was a flash animation (clickable). Pretty cool, as the animation ran thru a regular advert space on the content space of the page.
Martin 23 Sep 09
This type of advertising is especially annoying to me as I often scroll the page by holding the middle mouse button down and moving the mouse up or down.
Scott 23 Sep 09
EW.com did it several weeks ago and I accidentally clicked the background. It made me wonder why EW hated me.
Mark C. Webster 23 Sep 09
New York Post ran a huge site takeover yesterday for Norwegian Cruise Lines. The background (clickable), all the ads, and they even recolored the NY Post logo to match.
My guess is we’re going to continually see more and more of this…
Marco 23 Sep 09
Last week corriere.it, one of the main italian traditional newspaper website, tried it with a car ad.
The result was a bunch of thousand people pissed by the brutality of this kind of ad.
It might work and bring traffic to the advertiser, but at what price?
Shane Vitarana 23 Sep 09
I saw it first on the pitchfork site. Then myspace and now last.fm.
Scott Bush 23 Sep 09
Hasn’t ESPN been doing this to a degree. It’s not as pronounced as THP , but it’s still pretty notable in their background.
karl 23 Sep 09
http://www.aftonbladets.se – one of Sweden’s major newspapers does campaigns like this all the time.
Chris 23 Sep 09
hulu.com: turn off the lights, while watching an embedded movie and click on the dark faded surrounding. voila. ads.
Caspar Chiquet 24 Sep 09
Seems to be a European thing, Blick, a major Swiss newspaper does it too, since quite a while.
Sven 24 Sep 09
This happens all over the place. A little surprised that you haven’t seen it.
sean 24 Sep 09
Hype Machine has it also
Mads Buch Stage 24 Sep 09
They have been doing this on almost all the mayor sites in Denmark for the last 2-3 years.
And yes, it is extremely annoying and I argue against it whenever I can.
But, unfortunately a lot of people don’t think past the “Wow, the takeover had a CTR of 2%!” – even though 1,5% may be accidentalt, hence worthless, clicks on the background.
Ben Ackles 24 Sep 09
Pandora has always used this technique to display advertisements. Vimeo has also worked out deals to let the advertisers control the background. Check out this Honda Insight commercial on Vimeo released a couple months ago.
http://vimeo.com/4281939
Push play to see the whole background fad to black & the title lights up. It’s overwhelming, yet interesting as a pioneer in this technique.
Jacob 24 Sep 09
These are on cnet.com.au quite a bit, in fact, they have one now
Peter Cooper 24 Sep 09
Touch Arcade (best iPhone games blog IMHO ) did this for the Rolando launch last year. I think they might have even done it for Rolando 2 as well. Like others, I’ve also seen it at CollegeHumor from time to time.
I quite like it. It’s not too intrusive (that is, it’s not in the middle of content) and raises awareness well.
Greg 24 Sep 09
ESPN did this with Ford, iirc, when they relaunched their web site earlier in the year.
Also, has commenter already mentioned – this has been in practice on CollegeHumor and the likes for a good 2 years now to promote typically movies.
David 24 Sep 09
Looks like the same thing is going on at washingtonpost.com.
merengue 24 Sep 09
Terrible User Experience = Number of clicks / Number of unhappy users
Andrew Banks 24 Sep 09
Seen it on imdb.com for a long time. But yeah, it’s annoying.
John Fredrickson 24 Sep 09
I don’t know about clicks, but I have seen many sites selling full-page background ads recently. Most notably Ask.com.
Zach 24 Sep 09
IMDB does it too…
jay 24 Sep 09
Gamespot.com has done it before … at least 3-4 years earlier.
Tony Lenzi 24 Sep 09
The Washington Post is doing this with Seimens, same ad, right now (www.washingtonpost.com).
James Stiff 24 Sep 09
I must admit, I have designed a number of “homepage takeovers” or “fireplaces” for NME .COM over the past nine months or so. I have mixed feelings about them but they are preferable to nasty, obtrusive, expanding flash ads.
Roy Tomeij 24 Sep 09
Largest Dutch news site NU.nl (www.nu.nl) has done these kind of “homepage takeovers” more than once (for Vodafone, etc.). They often make them interact with the ad spots inside the page two (leaderboard, rectangles, etc).
Kaanon 25 Sep 09
And another thing!
“Normal” users don’t click around as much as we professional web guys do. They just scroll.
Kim 25 Sep 09
That ad pissed me off so much! I must have accidentally clicked it at least a dozen times through the course of the day just trying to set the focus back to my browser when I had things over that window. At least on Perez the backgrounds aren’t entirely clickable and it’s just a re-branding for a given product or service. Seimens and HuffPo went overboard on that clickable everything!
Cemre Gungor 25 Sep 09
The same style of adcan be seen in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat’s web site (http://www.hs.fi).
Ben 25 Sep 09
Seen this on many sites for the last 2-3 years. Many call it “wallpaper adds”.
Not always involving the clicking part though.
I think making it easy to click by mistake doesn’t do any favors to the advertiser. CTR might be higher but at the cost of getting people pissed off at the brand.
Spingirl 25 Sep 09
Wash Po did it yesterday – agree with @Kim – more annoying than effective.
John Coonen 25 Sep 09
Clever. Editorial island.
Andre Torrez 25 Sep 09
Video game sites have done this for years. Blues News had takeovers in the late nineties. Logo and all.
Antoine Butler 25 Sep 09
Pandora.com and Dictionary.com do this pretty consistently. I first saw this technique years ago when used for entertainment related marketing. ie, a new game for Xbox being advertised through out the xbox site as part of the general layout, kind of trumping all other featured games in regards to visibility.
Although the “click anywhere” approach is new to me. Good for the advertiser, but I’d think pretty bad for the advertisee.
Jason Norberg 25 Sep 09
Reminds me of when Marketwatch.com (then CBSMarketwatch) a few years ago sold the background of their financial charts to Budweiser. It was just a branding campaign with Budweiser’s logo and no click-thru, but it should of tipped us off to the impending economic downfall.
Noel C 25 Sep 09
I don’t mind Pandora’s use of advertising that way. Accidental clicks or not, if the ads aren’t making loud noises, pop-outs, causing seizures or unbelievably annoying to grab your attention, I think this is a better use of display advertising online.
Richard Bronosky 26 Sep 09
I’m pretty sure we’ve done this at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I know that I have seen full background ads on our site. I would assume that stray clicks took you to the advertiser’s site. However, I cannot confirm that functionality or even who the advertiser was because I don’t look at or click ads except for those in Gmail or my Google search results pages.
Claudia 27 Sep 09
@Mark Get over it. Ever heard of moving on.
Joe Grossberg 28 Sep 09
@Claudia Not a chance. I recommend you read up on your Santayana.
This discussion is closed.