• by Masha Geller , November 16, 2001

Maybe it's because it's Friday afternoon. Maybe it's because it's almost dark outside at it's not even 5 p.m. Maybe I'm just cranky and easily bored today, but Yahoo's "innovative online advertising" push has lost my vote of enthusiasm.

I logged onto their homepage to see if the Pizza Hut ad we wrote about last week was still there, but instead of a flying pizza I got a flying lemon.

Literally. An animated yellow lemon bobbed across the screen, splashed into the Marketplace section on the right and turned an ordinary Pepsi logo into a Pepsi Twist logo.

And I'm sorry to say I was really disappointed by the creators of this lemon thing. In all fairness, I understand that Yahoo has finally found what seems like a great ad format for its homepage - one of the most heavily trafficked pages on the entire web - and maybe I should be more patient.

But does everything have to bob around the screen before flying to the right - first it was birds, then pizzas, now lemons. What's next? Clearly, this ad borrowed just about everything it could from last week's Pizza Hut ad, which in turn borrowed a lot from that Ford Explorer trial ad a few months ago.

Here's the formula: something (birds, lemon) appears at the top of the page or bursts through the middle of the page (pizza), then flies over to a box on the right hand side of the page. Something happens in the box, such as birds uncover the Ford logo, the pizza gets sprinkled with toppings, or the lemon splashes into Pepsi. To go any further the user must click.

So, here's what I want to know - is this what has become of online ad creative? Have all creative departments turned into unimaginative copycats? Or does DHTML only allow things to fly from left to right?