If there were commandments in online advertising and marketing, atop that list should be: Know thy medium.

For the past several weeks, Ohio.com, the online home of the Akron Beacon Journal, has positioned a button ad on the right side of its home page where Dr. James George, DDS promotes his dental services. (By the way, doesn’t this guy look like James Lipton?)

Ohio.com doesn’t use its medium, the Internet, in the right way for two reasons:

1. The ad is an annoying Flash animation that blocks you from clicking on any news story in the path of a blimp that zips across the page.
2. If the blimp entices you to click on George’s button, an external application fires up to read a linked pdf.

Usability expert Jakob Nielson notes in his Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design that

Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.

Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate.

PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.

Worse yet, on slower computers or Web connections, unexpected pdfs have the tendency to crash browsers and computers. Even if that doesn’t happen, pdfs really slow down the users’ experience as their computers manage an unexpected download. On faster machines, less savvy users are disorientated, not recognizing that they are actually in an external application. I’ve witnessed this many, many times.  All sorts of other usability issues pop up with pdfs as Nielson notes in another post.

Ok, so we’ve established that pdfs generally are not user-friendly. What should have Ohio.com done?

1. If there must be an annoying flying blimp, which I’m sure the client loved, render it in javascript or some less obtrusive form of Flash so users can navigate to surrounding stories without interference. You still grab the readers’ attention but don’t meddle with their ability to use your product. (Journalists should also contemplate the ethical dilemma the blimp creates by obtruding their content.)
2. Get off their lazy butts and create a landing page for Dr. George. What an awesome upsale! Or at least do it like George does on his Web site. Although surrounded by an ugly wrapper, George’s coupon page allows you to print gifs of his money savers by opening them in a pop-up window. (If I wanted to get picky, I would point out that pop-up blockers are standard with many modern browsers and are on by default. By making the coupons a pop-up, many users will not see them — at least not easily.)
3. At minimum warn users that an external application will open a pdf of the coupons.

Ohio.com’s ad salespeople are really doing Dr. George a disservice by linking to a usability-unfriendly pdf of his printed ad and deploying story-click-blocking animations. They are not alone. Many newspapers republish pdfs of their print ads online as a “service” to readers — but more accurately as a disservice to their advertisers. The online salesforce would do better to take advantage of the Web’s abilities rather than lazily posting a pdf of the newspaper ad.