I found an interesting article about banner blindness. The article basically confirms something I had suspected for some time, people ignore web-ads. It seems the web-ads that are the most efficient are not the stupid animated monkeys, but stuff that looks like content. The good news is that this might mean the end of flashy ads. The bad news is that the most efficient adds are the ones that basically blur the line between content and ad.

In some sense, this is a trend I already noticed. Certain magazines already have ads that take a full page and have a layout that mimics the layout of the normal pages. Only a small note indicates that this is an ad. I find this quite fishy, in particular if the ad is an scientific magazine and pretends to be a scientific article. In movies, you have more and more product placement, which is again a blurring between the content and the ad. I suppose the next step will be fake politicians that are actually product placement agents…