“Tomorrow is so yesterday”: Look, a cool overlayer!

It was a while ago I discovered the Intel campaign and the cool “rockstar” ad you might already have seen on YouTube. Basically, it became viral, a true viral (I’ll be writing about viral ads on some other occasion). But I couldn’t just ignore the Intel ad on the New York Times website. It’s what you can call a true overlayer and, most of all, a cool overlayer. Not killing your browsing, giving new ideas to the readers, a true advertising concept.

I was meaning to write this article a long time ago, but it took me a while to set up this blog and I wasn’t really feeling in the mood to write. When you have clients bugging allover, it’s kinda complicated. Nevermind that. Let’s speak about the Intel overlayer ad.

The overlayer ad on the New York Times website. Absolutely brilliant

What’s new about this online ad?

Everyone has a thing with online ads. Some like them, some hate them, others just ignore them. Some people are ad-blind, but lots of Internet users are like me: they’re using AdBlock. I use AdBlock, but I don’t block all adservers at once. I only block those that serve ads from clients unable to create a good banner or from agencies that are too afraid about not reaching the needed CTR, that would rather use the whole screen than create a good message.

So what’s new about this Intel ad? Well, the concept. It’s not just about Intel, it’s about the future, it’s about the familiar product you buy and, most of all, it’s about imagining how you’re favourite newspaper will look in about 30 years from now on.

The concept

When seeing the overlayer, I said “Hell, did New York Times got such a radical design change?“. Because – and I know some would disagree – it looks so damn cool! In about 10 seconds, the familiar layout came out. The banner was gone. I scratched behind my head and I looked around the website. It was then when i saw the banner in the right sidebar. As a hover effect on the banner, the overlayer popped-out again. And I looked at that banner ten or twelve times.

That’s the actual beauty. They’re not selling you a chip, but the image of the future. They don’t tell you to buy a chipset, they tell you to keep buying your favourite newspaper, because you never know how it’s going to change your life. Intel doesn’t ask you to buy, they tell you what you are going to buy in the future. And that’s cool, because it’s not agressive, it’s actually peaceful. And that’s one of the things the advertising tends to be missing nowadays.