I was reading an article on the Guardian's web site when I came across one of the funniest Flash ads I've seen. Unfortunately, I was laughing at it instead of with it 
The ad, for British Airways, (screenshot above) scrolls down from the picture to a message but, get this, there's a scroll bar next to it. They used a scroll pane component in a Flash ad! Wow! Talk about overkill (or lazy... or both?!) Refresh the linked article a few times and you might just catch the actual ad.
Regardless, I guess it made me blog it so maybe it's not a bad ad after all!
The Overkill defined: Using a ScrollPane component in a Flash ad! article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Refreshed at least 20 times. Didn’t show up for me
Anyway: lol
Yeah, I suspect this is another case of a team where someone must have known it was a dumb idea but someone else was more powerful or more persuasive or something. I have been on projects where I felt a I had to make compromises that I thought were misguided. But, the lesson I think is that when you know it’s a bad idea just be loud and put up a fuss. Who knows the story here.
Someone probably paid a flash freelancer £300 a day for that!
eeek … as someone who makes a living from flash media and advertising this is embarrassing. Its Agency.com that do the BA stuff and its usually top notch stuff - quite what went wrong here I dont know !!!
Looks like a MPU size was booked (300×250px) and the creative delivered was larger that required so they quickly wrapped the thing in a component !!
Crazy thing is the component alone would have eaten up the allowable asset footprint (in temrs of file size) so its doubly bad work !!!
Interactive Banner Ad? Simple and usable. What’s wrong with it?
Let’s try to be open minded!
It seems they removed it from rotation.
Aral, this scroll stuff might be a trick just to make user click the scroll track (part of the banner), because user should have been wondered what’s hiding behind the edges of the enigmatic masked area. But, even if this is the case, it still seems to be too odd
@Rostislav: Clicking the scroll track didn’t cause the banner to be clicked. You could scroll the banner up/down with it. It was basically just a ScrollPane component
An overkill or was it one of those…. it has to be done in an hour type of banner?
Une overdose ou était-ce un de ces…. il faut le faire en une heure type de publicité?