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As you all know, if I were in charge, those little ad insertion routines would check to see if it had something valid to return before it dumped its garbage or broken image icon on the screen. But do you know why they don’t? The same reason every other mid to small software company puts out junk: there’s no retribution from the users. Newspaper and other Web sites throw up a bunch of crap that leaks memory and occasionally delivers a touch of malware, and their hands are clean, since it’s a case of their ad rotators having problem. The blame is thus diffused so as to not be painful or otherwise actionable.

(Thanks to reader “Kip Steele.” That sounds like a testing name to me. At the top of my resume, I put the pseudonym “Mal V. Zance” myself.)

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If you don’t, you’re all right with the company serving ads up for the StLToday.com, where this happens all the time.

To prevent things like this:

You know, quality isn’t just making sure that things don’t blow up with certain click-and-key combinations.  And people can and will screw up the simplest of things.

Keep that in mind, I suppose, when you’re participating in the program.  A couple stray unrecognized characters cut-and-pasted here and there could probably blow your whole credit rating.

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This one falls on the ad syndicator, but that’s one reason you need to find and check your ads in the ad syndicator’s environment or in the wild.

That is not a shank.

Of course, even when QA points this out, the designers are in love with their own design genius and with the clean lines of a semi-automatic pistol, so they use the image that does not match the headline anyway.  Twits.

Oh, yes, I can see the account executives and the creative director telling them that they had to hook the banner ad up to the Twitter API so the banner ads could run the latest tweets.  Because using Twitter is cool!

Interactive agencies often do things, and sell the clients things, that the interactive agency personnel think are cool.  See also those annoying 3-d Flash immersion landscapes.  These things often really don’t add anything for the user, and as this ad shows, sometimes outstrip the actual technical ability of the interactive agencies.

But we have to put a Twitter feed into a banner ad because we can.  Then we will tell our other clients we’re experts at it.  Then we’ll sell ourselves as experts at it, and we’ll do it over and over even though putting a RT @bonnie YEAH! in your banner ad does nothing but use a social media technology just to use it.  And it will go on until they find a nice, new shiny object.

This Target ad must have some dynamic generation behind it that’s actually less than dynamic:

A LasikPlus ad had a number of problems:

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To whit:

• The word Sight is misspelled in the name of the promotion at the bottom.
• The ad remained in rotation after the expiration of the promotion.
• The nearest location address is dummy data.

Maybe they’re hoping you’ll think your eyes are deceiving you and you should ACT NOW!

Thanks, g33klady.  I was afraid this sorts of banner ads only happened to me.

For starters, when it prefers Flash ads, but if you don’t have Flash installed, it spits up a broken image:

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Never mind that.  Here’s the ad, Dad:

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Now, you all know I love nothing more than clicking into a Web contest and showing how fragile the form is.

So I click it, and that click throws a pop-under ad:

Then, horror of horrors, apparently the Web ad links to the Examiner’s intranet.  You know, the kind that usually isn’t available for the rest of the Web to see:

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So you know what that means, right?

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Yeah, I’ve got nothing to write about today.

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Either the interactive agency just phoned it in on creating a jpg equivalent for a Flash ad (although Flash enabled ads successfully rotated into the spot), or:

The ad rotating company helped out.

The interactive agency probably shared the image files with the client, and no client would have accepted that.  Or should have.  But if they sent it to the ad company, and the file was 10k too big, so someone decided to rush it and just compress it a little more….

I have seen this or similar things happen.  When you deal with a third party delivery system, be it e-mail or banner ads, you need to review the final product of those companies’ tinkering to ensure they’re not screwing it up.  Because they certainly can, and their QA processes are probably more lax than the interactive agency QA.

By the way, allow me to say it again: interactive agency QA.  Because on the Google search for the term, QAHY comes in behind expired job postings for the term, and I think anyone looking for interactive agency QA could learn more by reading this blog than the Craigslist expired page.  Hey, and if someone wanted to engage some experienced help, it’s TheDirector at this domain.