By Kyle Johnson

Is online advertising a good vehicle for reaching brand advertising goals? Judged by their actions, more and more advertisers are voting “yes.” During the past several months, we’ve observed a gradual but decisive stride from an ambivalent stance toward a full embrace of online media as a branding tool.

This past week, we witnessed a Ford display campaign that to us represented a noteworthy waypoint in the development of online ads designed for branding objectives: ads that reject the click. We’ve previously noticed other ads that don’t facilitate or don’t enable clickthrough – typically, they instead respond to a user’s click with rich content that opens up within the publisher’s frame. But directly beneath the Ford ad’s “Click to Watch Video” button was a message we hadn’t noticed before: “You will not leave Yahoo!”

Full story: http://blog.compete.com/2009/10/23/ads-that-reject-the-click/