New Job and Punching Monkeys

I am starting at a new job in a week as Lead Developer. This has kept me busy because I have been slaving away trying to wrap up all my responsibilities at my current job.

On a separate and completely unrelated note, today I saw another variation to those once-popular punch a monkey type of ads. I always humor the programmers of the ad by repeatedly clicking on the ad without actually hitting the target. I’ll try my very darn best to shoot between the targets, miss the baby, and just plain suck at punching.

I’m looking at your ad. I’m clicking — perhaps not where you intended, but I’m clicking. I’m looking at your moving monkey baby thing. I’ve glossed over the ad text. I’m still clicking. And yet nothing happens to move me from viewing the ad to viewing the product. Eventually, I get tired of amusing myself and stop clicking, returning to whatever I was doing.

To me, this is a failure on the advertiser’s part. They’ve gotten my attention and my willingness to interact with the ad, but they’ve failed to communicate why I am interested in the product and convert my interest into action that results in a sale. It seems to me that a failure to use the product in the interactive ad, or the lack of mind-share presence of the product, is a fundamental failure by the advertisers to leverage the limited attention granted to them from a web surfer.

There’s a small chance I’ll want to visit your site, but if I don’t understand what it is I’m punching a monkey for, if punching the monkey becomes the focus of my interaction, I certainly won’t be *actually* interested in visiting your site.

And this is why I love clicking between the action areas on those interactive ads. There’s many solutions around what I do, but it amazes me that the ad hasn’t evolved in the years since it first became popular. Addressing this is how Google became king.