Interstitial Advertisements

Enjoy the ride? What you just saw was an interstitial advertisement.

Interstitial ads (interstitial means "in between") are a way of placing full page messages between the current and destination page. Since the web is such a busy place, people have to find ways to cope with over-stimulation. One means of coping is known as sensory input filtering.  This means that our brains learn to filter out the vast majority of the messages coming at them. We the viewers, quickly learn at some level to recognize banner ads or anything that looks like a banner ad. We filter out most of the irrelevant noise but we also filter out many of the important messages. Interstitial messages, like TV commercials make viewers a captive of the message. 

Typical interstitials last ten seconds or less. That's five to ten seconds of doing nothing but looking at the ad. 

Suppose your company wants to promote the fact that their national conference on underwater laptop computers starts next week. Interstitial reminders would be placed between your main page and your most popular secondary pages. Through sensory input filtering, most of your clients would normally miss a banner message. But with an interstitial message, there's no avoiding it. Just hope your suppliers have plenty of underwater laptops in stock!  

Of course, ten seconds can feel like waiting for the Great Thaw if nothing is happening so it is best to provide some fast moving interest. Animated gifs, if used, should be compact and following pages should be fast loading. Also a "skip through" option should be provided as a courtesy to those who have no interest in your message. See the sample interstitial again