Samsung's Ad Agency Drops The Ball, Then Trips Over It

Moments ago, while reading my mail on Yahoo, I saw a Samsung ad that demonstrates VIVIDLY why quality control checks are so direly needed in all phases of the advertising process. First we'll look at the actual graphic file that was delivered to my browser.

The file name of this ad is "728x90_takeover_8-5.jpg" and it was placed in a 728 pixel wide by 90 pixel high space. Only one problem, the actual dimensions of the graphic are 512 pixels wide and 63 pixels high. It had to be stretched into the space, causing it to blur and pixelate, so its text looked like this screen capture direct from the Yahoo page:

But even worse than this, even worse than someone not noticing it was the wrong size, is that the agency sent the ad network a draft copy of the ad with lorem ipsum text as a placeholder where the legal disclaimer would be. If it's not as obvious in the 512 pixel wide version above, here it is cropped from a screen capture of the stretched version they were displaying.

And last but not least, their alt text for the image (used for text-only browsers and to help people who are visually impaired find out what the graphic says) is simply "Click to learn more..." Is that sick or what? It doesn't mention Samsung or give any idea what the ad is about, just "Click to learn more..." It is probably the most unhelpful alt text I've ever seen.

Samsung's ad people didn't just drop the ball on this one, they made mistake after mistake after mistake. Somehow all the checks and balances in the ad agency's procedures (assuming there were any) were completely missed and this ode to errors got through. It's embarrassing for Samsung, to be sure, but it's downright shameful for the agency that let this happen.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.