Floating Ads. Anyone Else Have These?

[Pete Incaviglia]

Tonight, I found out our sports section will have "floating ads" twice a week, starting next week.

For those who, like me, had no idea what these are, it's an ad that SITS PRECISELY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PAGE! And you build your page around the ad.

This is the last straw. I'm getting out of this business as soon as I ****ing can.

Anyone else have these, by the way? How ****ing stupid and ugly are they?

 

[pressboxramblings07]

I've never heard of that, and someone needs to get slapped.

Twice.

 

[whatwoulddamondo?]

no worse than the stickers on the front.

or the l-shaped ads.

or the u-shaped ads in the middle of a double truck.

they all suck.

 

[pressboxramblings07]

With the L-shaped ads and the U-shaped ads on trucks, you're not working AROUND them like you would an ad in the middle of the page. And stickers are stickers ... don't have to paginate around those.

That's pretty absurd. Hope they're paying a good price.

 

[Rumpleforeskin]

We had a floating ad once several weeks ago. It was murder to build around.

 

[imjustagirl]

We picked up diagonal ads in Richmond before I left. So you were losing extra half-inches of copy in every column. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

 

[whatwoulddamondo?]

And stickers are stickers ... don't have to paginate around those.

which can be even more of an issue...because you don't know where the machine will decide to place the sticker. so it's usually covering up the top headline, or obscuring your lead photo, or doing some other havoc to the page, and you have *no* control over it. at least with the floating ads, you can try to work around it.

these pages with floating ads, are they otherwise open? i've never seen them in practice in any of the local papers.

 

[Pete Incaviglia]

It would be a wide open page.

Basically, they move a quarter-page ad (maybe an eight-page ad) from the bottom left or bottom right corner of the page to the middle.

 

[SixToe]

Floating ads suck.

You can argue all you want that it's revenue.

But it cheapens the product by creating an ass-ugly page that is difficult for readers to enjoy and hard for anyone to create something visually appealing.

Even worse is when they are oval and not rectangular.

 

[HejiraHenry]

All I can think of is "Sinkers and Floaters."

 

[SoCalDude]

A long time ago, we had the Camel Scoreboard.
It sold as a full-page ad on the back page and was actually a Camel cigarette ad that sort of framed the page. We filled up the middle with agate.
If was F-ing pathetic, but the good news was, it earned full-page ad money and we still had about three-quarters of the page as usable space for the agate.

 

[Sam Mills 51]

We picked up diagonal ads in Richmond before I left. So you were losing extra half-inches of copy in every column. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

More Media General brilliance. Understand that pain.

Floating ads are absolutely stupid. Either buy a full-page ad or simply place a traditional one. This sounds like another idiotic attempt by advertisers to fix something that isn't broken (that is, the way ads are done, not newspapers and their referring to massive layoffs in a weak attempt to cut their way back to fat profit margins).

 

[SportsGuyBCK]

More Media General brilliance. Understand that pain.

Isn't that an oxymoron?

 

[Songbird]

no worse than the stickers on the front.

or the l-shaped ads.

or the u-shaped ads in the middle of a double truck.

they all suck.

"Sticky" ads on our front (a tab) are becoming more popular. But we're charging $1200 a pop. Yet more businesses are willing to pony up.

 

[Big Circus]

We picked up diagonal ads in Richmond before I left. So you were losing extra half-inches of copy in every column. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Thanks, MG. My shop's next, I'm sure.

 

[EE94]

We've had those floating ads. Absolute ***** to build around.

We've also had "flex-form" ads - imagine a clipped pic of somethign and the type runs unevenly around the border

once those get into the paper, lots of advertisers want them. a complete intrusion

 

[SF_Express]

A long time ago, we had the Camel Scoreboard.
It sold as a full-page ad on the back page and was actually a Camel cigarette ad that sort of framed the page. We filled up the middle with agate.
If was F-ing pathetic, but the good news was, it earned full-page ad money and we still had about three-quarters of the page as usable space for the agate.

I remember those at one of my old places, too; I think the idea was really FOR the agate page.

My local South Florida paper has floating ads now. They also have a pyramid on some doubletrucks, but the one I got yesterday or the day before, they forgot to paginate the type around the ad, so more and more of the column was covered up the further down you read. Obviously extremely annoying for the reader, and I'm sure for people laying out the section, too.

 

[dixiehack]

A floating ad on agate or stock listings (as though anybody has those now) doesn't look too bad. Anything else, blech.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

A long time ago, we had the Camel Scoreboard.
It sold as a full-page ad on the back page and was actually a Camel cigarette ad that sort of framed the page. We filled up the middle with agate.
If was F-ing pathetic, but the good news was, it earned full-page ad money and we still had about three-quarters of the page as usable space for the agate.

Judging by your screen name, you were dealing with Pacific time -- although maybe you were somewhere else at the time. When I dealt with the Camel Scoreboard, I was in a less advantageous time zone, and those were the days when pressrooms had rules like, "No replates on pages with spot color!" So we ended up having two scoreboard pages, a real one and the Camel Scoreboard with useless **** like PGA Money List and three months of boxing schedule.

I had to deal with floating ads (on facing pages) once. It sucks, but what can you do? There's no way to win that fight. Hopefully, the publisher decides it looks like crap. I have no idea if that's what happened, but we didn't see them again.

 

[dixiehack]

Judging by your screen name, you were dealing with Pacific time -- although maybe you were somewhere else at the time. When I dealt with the Camel Scoreboard, I was in a less advantageous time zone, and those were the days when pressrooms had rules like, "No replates on pages with spot color!" So we ended up having two scoreboard pages, a real one and the Camel Scoreboard with useless **** like PGA Money List and three months of boxing schedule.

What you call useless ****, I once called manna, back when we had to do a sister paper's agate page for something like an 8 p.m. Eastern deadline. No telling how many times BOX--FightSked bailed my ass out.