Obtrusive Banner Ads

Don’t Like the Dancing Cowboys? Results Say You Do
By BRAD STONE | The New York Times | January 18, 2007

Most online advertisements are becoming less obtrusive and more tailored to the interests of individual Web users. Among the stubborn holdouts are the two-stepping cowboys, frisky rooftop dancers and weird tattoos in ubiquitous Web banners from LowerMyBills.com.

The company, one of the Internet’s biggest advertisers, routinely festoons Web sites large and small with its ads, spending $74.6 million on them in the first 11 months of 2006, according to TNS Media Intelligence. The surprising success of the ads led LowerMyBills to a significant payday: the credit agency Experian bought the eight-year-old company for $400 million in 2005.

But on the path to prosperity, LowerMyBills has run into a lot of people who say the undulating characters in the ads are highly distracting and have so little to do with low-interest loans that they border on the surreal.

The most memorable LowerMyBills banners feature silhouetted dancers like the prancing cowboys, or the couple doing a jig on their roof under a full moon. In another ad, a suited man wildly pumps his fists under the headline “$510,000 Mortgage for under $1,698/month.”

In variations of these ads that are ever stranger, the same figures are tattooed onto arms or shaved into hair.

“The ads are like a Monty Python sketch,” said Dev Ravindran, a software developer from Jersey City who created a blog to track and humorously critique the ads (lowermybillswatch.blogspot.com). “Some of them are so out of the blue they make no sense.”

Rogers Cadenhead, an author and blogger, resorted to tinkering with his computer to block all ads from the company. “I was trying to read a news article and realized the dancing mortgage people were eliminating all rational thought from my brain,” he said.

There may be few online ads less aimed at a specific audience than the LowerMyBills dancers, who are equally likely to perform their fanciful boogie on a bulletin board for hockey enthusiasts as next to an article related to home finance or on a mortgage-related site. (They also appear on the Web site of The New York Times.)

Matt R. Coffin, the co-founder and chief executive of LowerMyBills, said the company’s ad campaign represented a return to traditional advertising principles rather than an embrace of the latest conventional wisdom.

“Building a brand is often about being different, and we are always looking for new and innovative ways to attract the attention of consumers interested in lowering their bills,” he said.

Mr. Coffin said that the company closely tracks the performance of its ads, removing the ones that do not attract clicks, and that the banners are highly effective at getting Internet users to fill out loan applications. “If you keep seeing the same ads, that means they are working,” he said.

Internet companies like LowerMyBills are called lead generators because they take loan applications filled out by customers who click the ads and give them to actual lenders like Citibank, which pay them for the referrals. The company’s success hinges on buying lots of low-cost ad space on Web sites and then persuading users to click.

But on Web bulletin boards, the ads are drawing a lot of criticism. In one discussion of the company, a user calling herself Jane Dough wrote, “Even if they had the best interest rate around, I would still find myself thinking, ‘But aren’t they the cheesy company with the stupid dancing people?’ ”

In another discussion last week on the site of the band the Beastie Boys, fans of the group pondered the prevalence of the ads and in particular the woman on the rooftop, who appears to have cornrows in her hair and an unusual body shape for a model.

Others wonder what the dancers have to do with home equity loans or debt consolidation. Mr. Coffin said by way of explanation: “Our view is that people are crazy about saving money, and when they do save money they are very happy.”

But that does not explain other LowerMyBills ads, like the ones featuring a dog wearing goggles and a scampering duck.

One person who can shed some light on the LowerMyBills mystique is Jennifer Uhll, a 35-year-old graphic artist from Los Angeles who joined LowerMyBills in 2002 and became creative director in 2005. She left the company last summer to start her own firm, Juhll Inc.

Ms. Uhll said the company has included maps of the United States in its ads for years, ever since executives read a brochure about online advertising that said people responded to the chance to specify their home states. Most LowerMyBills ads include this feature, though it seems to have little effect on the loan application that people are asked to fill out.

Ms. Uhll said she first used the silhouettes in January 2005, in an ad featuring a woman blowing colorful bubbles that represented the 50 states. Four months later, another LowerMyBills ad with three prancing, high-kicking sheep under the headline “Mortgage Rates Hit Record Lows!” also performed well.

So Ms. Uhll combined the two concepts, animating her silhouetted, pony-tailed woman with a swaying modern dance. Ms. Uhll said she is a dancer and took a variety of dancing classes for more than a decade. She is also a fan of the pet sequences in “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which relates to the animal ads.

“I usually put into my creative work what I love and what makes me happy and gets my attention,” she said.

Ms. Uhll said her online advertisements for financial companies, including ones she created before and after she worked for LowerMyBills, typically earned around $4 in lender referral fees for each dollar spent on the ad. The average for most lead-generation companies is less than $2 earned for each dollar spent on Web ads.

LowerMyBills, which is based in Santa Monica, Calif., declined to say exactly how effective its ads are, and it seemed eager to prevent that information from becoming public. After Ms. Uhll spoke to a reporter, she said, the company sent her two e-mail messages and a formal legal letter, warning of her continued obligations and saying it was “extremely sensitive to the disclosure of confidential information.”

Ms. Uhll said she is aware of Internet users who hate the LowerMyBills ads and she does question whether the ads pollute the Internet, as some assert. But she said she decided that “there are lots of people who are glad they saw the ad and ended up paying a lot less money.”

Many online advertising experts express a grudging respect for the work of Ms. Uhll and her successors at LowerMyBills. “I do have a bit of admiration for the company,” said James Gardner of the online ad archive Adverlicio.us, which maintains a collection of LowerMyBills ads. “They are very comfortable flying in the face of scorn and ridicule.”

Timothy Hanlon, a senior vice president at the Starcom MediaVest Group, a media communications firm, called the company a “bottom feeder,” but he added: “The last time I checked, advertising was designed to draw people’s attention. On that level, LowerMyBills succeeds with a gold star.”

Mr. Coffin was not apologetic about his company’s methods. “One thing we will probably expand to the nth degree are the dancing silhouette ads,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity to double down on a proven winner.”