How to Waste Your Advertising Dollars on the iPad

by Julie Gomoll on June 22, 2010

Step 1: Sign on with a big ad network who pays very little if any attention to targeting your ads to appropriate sites.

Step 2: Tell them to run your ads on the iPad with no attention paid to application demographics.

Step 3: Don’t bother to make your site iPad compatible.

Lending Tree add with pop up menus that don't work on the iPad

Check out this ad, which runs on GodFinger on the iPad. Are GodFinger players looking for loans? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, because you can’t click on the pop-up menus necessary to continue.

Bad move. Not only do you not look cutting edge, Lending Tree, you look lame.

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  • http://firecatstudio.com Susan Price

    iPad is relatively new, so not too surprising – and the larger the organization, the longer it takes to align the planets of “Where are we running these ads?”, “Who is testing what we run?”

    Following accessibility and coding best practices has never been more important. At Firecat Studio, we’ve been happily surprised at how well the sites we code show up in iPad/iPhone and other mobile devices. I attribute much of that to the accessibility coding training our folks received through Knowbility’s AIR program. Good, clean coding FTW!
    .-= Susan Price´s last undefined ..If you register your site for free at =-.

  • Julie Gomoll

    The companies advertising in the iPad version of Wired are doing it right, that’s for sure. I saw some pretty creative thinking there, and I’m sure we’ll see more and more.

    I guess seeing that Lending Tree ad on GodFinger, despite the fact that it was on an iPad, felt really old school — ad blasts all about quantity with little or no regard for the target.