Pointless Banner Ads
[Regarding the June 2000 issue:] A simple fact about banner ads is that after the first couple times a person clicks on one and
gets sent to a site of no value, he or she
will probably never click on one again.
As a person's Web experience increases,
the brain will train itself to virtually ignore anything in the common 400x60 pixel
space at the top of any page.
Advertisers would be better off going back to the old-time model of simple brand recognition.
An ad should not hide the product or company name behind trickery, flashy graphics, or tiny pong games. Instead it should show the company logo and make a simple offer for more
information. In the past, companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi got their brands into the public eye by supplying outdoor signs for small restaurants all over the nation. That model carries over to the Web. Banner ads should be geared toward simply getting brand names into the public eye and advertisers shouldn't be obsessed with click-through rates. I would trade a thousand people simply seeing my brand name and logo for that one elusive click.
J. Keith Lehman
ADP/Hayes-Ligon
www.hayes-ligon.com
Undefing Hashes
Just a quick email regarding Kent Tegels'
"Freudian Script" article in the May 2000 issue of Web Techniques. If you want to delete all the entries from a Perl hash, you don't necessarily need to iterate through all its keys and delete their associated values. You could also undef it, or assign it to an empty list, as in undef %bla; or %bla=(); for example.<>
