“Banners, Google and Anguish” or “No random numbers please, we’re Google.”

We in the online advertising industry make banners. A lot of banners. They’re a necessary evil of online advertising and annoy us all on a regular basis, but they get results, and that’s all that matters in the long run.

We don’t publish these banners ourselves, instead relying on various Media Centrals to deploy and distribute our ads to the various publishers and eventually across your favourite websites on the intertubes.

Contrary to what you might think, most banner ads aren’t just randomly cobbled together pieces of Flash animation, engineered only to aggravate. There are strict rules and regulations that enforce a level of quality and police the potential disruptiveness of banners.

You can’t, for example, open pop-ups willy-nilly, or start playing sound without user interaction. The Media Centrals enforce these rules and guidelines by decompiling every banner and checking the code for malicious scripts and the presence of certain required snippets of code for the banner to work as it’s supposed to (Well, most of them do anyway. There are a couple of shady Media Centrals out there who’ll publish anything really, but we don’t use them).

Most of the time, this all works without a problem. Aside from a few annoyances that stem from the lack of a standardized “clicktag”, the Centrals don’t needlessly scrutinize our banners. Until a few days ago, that is. (more…)