Well-behaved embedded video ad

No-one can have missed the new crop of Apple-beats-PC ads – nicely filmed, but getting a bit annoying even for Mac Addicts like me. I won’t bother with a detailed critique now: suffice to say that they’re carried by the particular humour of the comedians, and that the ads aren’t so much for the Mac as for iLife (I suppose that Apple have to flog the software angle).

Anyhoo, that’s not the point. The reason I thought of the ads again today is that – upon visiting Technorati – I see that the ad’s running embedded on the home page.

Best of all, the ad’s running silently – you need to mouse-over the ad to both enable sound and restart the clip (all of which happens seamlessly I should say).

It struck me as a sensible way to have rich media and clips operating on the home page: unobtrusively and considerately. I wouldn’t be surprised if the click-through (or rather ‘mouse over’ is higher because it’s elective – rather than the rush of people looking for ways to ‘kill’ the ad as it interrupts whatever else we were doing at the time.

Good to see such sensible developments in ad serving.