I wholeheartedly love and support Add Art (the brilliant Firefox plug-in that replaces web banner ads with random art with about 99% success) but I just have one small suggestion for making it better. I would like easy to navigate access to all past sets of Add Art and the ability to create a profile, save and choose my favorite sets, maybe even uploading my own sets without having to submit them to the larger population. Because the last three or four sets have just completely sucked to the point where I would almost rather see the ads and all I want in the world is to go back to the set where every banner ad was replaced by a picture of this Koons sculpture and just stay with that for the next year or so.
Jeff Koons (American, b. 1955). Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988.
Ceramic. 42 x 70 1/2 x 32 1/2 in. (106.7 x 179.1 x 82.5 cm).
I happened to mention Add Art at work in a marketing meeting where we were discussing banner ad campaigns and I was shocked to receive a bunch of confused blank looks. From a room full of marketing people! I had thought a huge percentage of people used some kind of ad blocking plug-in these days. Once again my estimation of the general population betrayed my laughable optimism. (I suppose that’s a good thing as long as my company’s banner ad campaigns continue to perform well.)
Are you running Add Art? Something different but similar? If not, why not? Do you like looking at ads? Do you just not see them anymore or find them easy to ignore?
December 24th, 2009 - 4:13 am
Feel free to get in touch directly with suggestions for add-art. Much better would be to take advantage of its open license and code the improvements yourself. These user interface and options for art, are for the most part, technical barriers.
But, as far as allowing users to choose please images and stick with them, that’s not the point of the plugin. The idea is to expose yourself to new things. Images that, at first, you might not enjoy or be comfortable with, but over the 2 week exhibition come to see in a new way. The idea isn’t to allow users to replace ads with images they are already familiar with – a plugin at http://www.prowebsurfer.com will allow you to do that already. The idea is to see new images that have been curated for you.
With more user choice and curated art in mind, we are working to allow users to subscribe to and curate their own feeds of images. So you could choose to subscribe to the SFMOMA feed, or some art lover in Cleveland’s feed, or a gallery in Japan’s feed. But again, we’re up against technical barriers. We can use code.