Imagine sitting down in the middle of the day to catch 10 minutes of television news with a coffee. You relax in your seat and listen to the headlines. Two minutes later a Peugeot car ad swoops into view and obscures half of the screen. The picture just sits there - morphing into different views of the same car while the news broadcast carries on regardless.Surely advertising on television would never become that intrusive?
Surely television producers and editors would fight that kind of marketing?
Ads that so clearly ruin a viewing experience are probably inconceivable on television - so why do some publishers think they are acceptable in online news?
Yesterday I sat down for 10 minutes, with a coffee, to look at the headlines on scotsman.com. That site is cutting edge online journalism. In 2003 it won the Newspaper Society's Best Daily Newspaper on the Internet award for the second year running. In January its pages were viewed 13.8 million times by nearly 2 million unique users. As the Scottish Premier league is heading for a cracking climax, I browsed some of the big mid-week football stories. My guess is that these are among scotsman.com's best viewed pages.
About 30 seconds into a report, a gigantic picture of a Peugeot swoops into view. Right across the story and the picture. I was then treated to several views of the new 407. What scotsman.com has failed to grasp is that I don't want a new car. I am not interested in the new Peugeot and I don't think I've ever knowingly visited the motoring section of any online site.
I wanted to read about that evening's Hearts versus Hibernian game. I was taking a breather during a rough day. An ad you can choose to view is one thing. An ad you are forced to view is another - even if you have the option of closing the window. That ad was distracting, irritating and intrusive.
And this isn't the first time the site has relented to ads like these. In February scotsman.com carried a similar, and probably even more annoying, ad for a Chevrolet.
scotsman.com clearly spends time and money getting its site right. It has worked on every design detail to make it easy, pleasant and intuitive to use. Viewed in that context it is difficult to see how the Peugeot and Chevrolet ads can be justified and forcing them on unsuspecting users just cuts against the grain of an award winning strategy.
Of course news sites have to strike a balance between offering advertisers an innovative service on the one hand, and prioritising editorial on the other. But there are dozens of sites where I could usefully spend a few minutes. Given the choice, I'd use one that doesn't force its users to view its ads.
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