I’ve been noticing a certain type of ad placement lately I have no better name for than “ads after you do a thing”. I’m sure they aren’t new, they just feel new to me as I’ve been thinking about it.
Examples:
- After booking a class on Mindbody, the “You’ve successfully booked this class!” splash screen that comes up sometimes has an ad on it.
- After you’ve finished setting up mail forwarding or a vacation mail holding at the USPS (United States Postal Service) website, you’re shown a whole series of ads.
- When you pause a show a TV on a streaming service, the paused screen shows an ad. I can’t remember which service I saw this on.
What distinguishes these to me is that: they aren’t terribly annoying.
I’ve already done the thing I set out to do. They didn’t get in the way of that, and don’t get in the way of me moving on.
If anything, I’m more mentally ready to see and engage with the ad, because I’m at a mental stopping point. I’m at a little key moment where I’ve got a little less going on in my brain and about to move on to something new.
A lot of y’all are in the “all ads are bad” category and I can’t blame you. I’ve never been like that though, so seeing these kind of ideas is interesting to me. An effective ad that also isn’t intrusive and obnoxious is my kinda ad.
Agreed. I can appreciate anything that is well-executed and helpful – including ads. These sound like good ideas.
I think this could apply for any sort of interruption. One of my biggest bugbears is being in a rush to do a job, I open an app, and suddenly it wants to coerce me into an update. Wrong time! How about when I close the document I’m working on or when I’ve left it idle for a minute or two? Launch is NEVER the team I want to update unless it’s been a really long time and my version is grossly out of date.
Ehh … the first few times I ran into this type of ad system, I was fairly confused as to whether I had fully completed the original thing, or if shutting down the ads was part of completing the process. In theory fine, in practice its often a dark design pattern