And thank whoever that they didn’t throw any banners on the site. We’re speaking of course of Barry Diller and Tina Brown’s news aggregation site, The Daily Beast. The site’s pretty famously known for its lack of advertising. Anyway, earlier this month the site struck a deal with luxury goods maker Bottega Veneta.
We caught wind of their first relevant dive into the ad-pool, and the execution is, well, different. No banners, no pop-outs, no jackasses running across the screen like on TBS etc. Nay. This is a newish strike, made real by the folkers at Code and Theory. The Beast wants you to skip on over and check out their sliding panels (which normally contain news stories but for this little gig they slipped one pane in there that is actually an ad. SNEAKY!), which when clicked brings you into a window-shopping vignette where you can click things in the window and learn more, or slide on down the street to more windows etc. All in all it’s smooth, pretty, and best of all totally out-of-your-face.
But resist, resist we say, the desire to go see it as long as you can since of course clickidy-click-clacks is probably what the Beast is looking for. Unless of course, they’ve wisely convinced Bottega Veneta that clicks don’t mean shite (necessarily) — it’s all about exposure! Well, that’s what you say when the ad advertiser expects numbas, but they don’t show.
OK fine go look, and tell us if you think this notoriously ad-free site did a good job innovating.
More: “Free Dr. Pepper Fail”