My client loves pdfs. Or at least his PR people do. They are quite prolific, producing colorful, eye-catching pdfs to announce sales news.

I get several a month, to post to their web site.

Eye grabbing flyers have their place – in print. I cringe to think of visitor’s reactions to them on the website.

Do you see the problem?

The flyers become links, where they lose their eye-candy appeal. They go in a sidebar for company news. There they dilute the power of the site to focus buyers on information that might better serve their attention. They risk eroding visitor appreciation.

To read them, you have to launch a .pdf reader, which takes several seconds. Then, you get a pretty product image, and an invitation to come to the store, but without the critical facts to help you with your buying decision: like prices, for instance.

It’s like reducing a billboard to a 1/4 page ad, mailing it to your customers, and expecting them to thank you as they rummage around for a magnifying glass.

I want to help my client out of this self-defeating practice. Matthew Cramer’s Advertising Age article “Think Different: Maybe the Web’s Not a Place to Stick Your Ads” gives me the perfect input to make my case.

His fourth heading says it all: “Create Advertising that Has Value”. He quotes Jakob Nielsen: ‘The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium.” Because people who search, hit your site, and view your ads are looking to buy something, the value is to deliver the facts that tell them, “look no further” and buy from you.

In Cramer’s words, “people who come in contact with those ad forms generally are looking to buy something, which is why they searched in the first place. The same isn’t true of display ads, which Mr. Nielsen concludes ‘aren’t very well-suited for the web.’”

My advice to my clients: If I am to post pdfs, they should be more like factsheets and price lists than posters.

Am I wrong? What’s YOUR reaction to pdfs when you’re shopping for something?

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