Ken Sands thinks that the advertisements for AT&T on Madison.com
may be the worst he’s seen online. What’s got his goat is the “wallpaper”
loaded with AT&T logos that appears behind the hompage of the
website (at this writing). And because as the page loads you see the
corporate logos appear first, then editorial content on top of it,
there’s the sense that you’ve reached a corporate website.
Writes Sands in a blog item
for The Media Center, “This, omigod, is by far the worst thing I’ve
seen yet — worse by far than pop-ups and pop-unders and other
offensive types of online advertising. … Let’s hope this is an
experiment that dies quickly, beaten to death by publishers who
understand journalism and integrity.”
This isn’t the first time that news websites have sold advertising
space in the backgrounds of homepages. Among others, Marketwatch.com
has tried it in the past — and likewise faced criticism.
