Advertising.com: Unthinking upload

Frustration is fanned by the unadapted transfer of offline material.

The Site

Advertising.com, an online marketing services provider, has a blindspot in the adapting of content for its website.

The lead News & Events item on the site’s home page links to a press release about the findings of a recently published company survey, ‘Online Video: Consumers Prefers [sic] News Clips, Shorter Ads’. The release is in the Press Room section and concludes with the advice to anyone interested in reading the complete study to “please visit www.advertising.com”. The URL is not hyperlinked to either the site’s home page (where there is a link under a Research heading to a PDF of the study) or the full report (which sits in Press Room’s research sub-section).

The Takeaway

Advertising.com does its own marketing no good by neglecting to adapt a press release clearly devised primarily for an offline audience to its own online environment. The redundancy of referring its Press Room readers to the website they are already on fans the flames of frustration by being neither live nor specific enough to direct users to the complete study they were promised. As hand-offs go, it’s missing something below the elbow.

It’s hard to believe that a web-based operation is unaware of the fundamentals of content-linking – though it’s damaging enough that it creates the suspicion – so the likeliest explanation for the problem is unthinking and unchecked transfer of offline press release material to the website. The perpetuation of the incorrect English in the release heading (“…Consumers Prefers…”) looks to confirm this. Either way it’s not much of an advert for the company’s understanding of the peculiar demands of the medium.

First published on 18 September, 2007