Expandable banners: are they effective/do they just annoy people?

Question

Can anyone who works in marketing or advertising tell me if expandable banners really work? In my mind they're a step backwards towards pop-ups.

If you're not in marketing or advertising can you tell me what you think of expandable banners. Have you ever clicked on one? Does it bug you when you roll over a banner and it expands over other content on the page?

Answer 1

They force people to look at their advertisements. The important thing about advertising is to get the word out.

I've clicked on one by accident and it always angers me. Hate it when it gets on the front page I'm looking at and I activate the one on the back page

Answer 2

I despise the d**n things.  I hate it when it I open it accidentally.  Who invented those things anyway?

Answer 3

Sorry I use the free adblocker from:

http://adblockplus.org/en/

on Firefox and I can't see practically any ads. Until IE starts allowing third party programs to run it's just not my first choice of browsers.

If you haven't moved to Firefox you should. It's 100% compatible with Vista and far more configurable. Besides being free. You can have as many browsers loaded on your machine as you want.

I use IE only to DL updates to windows and check websites I develop.