This goes out to all you ad skeptics out there who bang on about how useless the internet advertising is and how it should be banned / destroyed / 101’d etc: it is sad that not often advertising is delivered as a complement to the content being viewed, and as such it doesn’t come across as an intrusive piece on the page. However, when it happens, it creates something useful!

I have just experienced something like this just now, looking at some technical article online — and even though I worked for Vibrant Media before, there’s no hidden agenda in highlighting this ad unit I spotted as one such piece of great advertising. (I know I slagged them off in the past as well, hope they don’t take it personally : guys, I’ve slagged off Google more than you, so don’t read too much into it! 🙂 )

It’s basically an IntelliTXT ad that combines (as you can see below) the advertising message at the top with a live Twitter feed underneath — which I thought it’s quite neat! Imagine that for instance you’re not interested in the advertising piece — however, you’re interested in the IBM cloud computing and as a Twitter user decide to keep an eye on their research (let’s face, IBM does actually do some cool cloud things!); in this case, the advertising piece will just make it obvious for you that it it is an IBM cloud message (you won’t follow the advertising message and ignore it quite likely and jump straight to the live feed) and in the same unit you have the Twitter feed which you can decide to follow and read right there and then! On the other hand if you’re not interested in either, you have a whitepaper available for download — which you can use to figure out if the IBM R&D in this area will interest you or not:

So, all in all, you can look at this as a piece of advertising — but really, if you look at it closer, it’s actually a piece of information, which, as it is the case with most information, some would find useful, some would find useless. But it is in fact information — so all you advertising “sworn enemies” out there, take notice! (Oh and well done Vibrant Media and IBM for this unit!)