I can certainly understand the need for this ad, but I still feel it has been taken too far.
I only noticed the ad when I used an older machine running IE the other day, and due to the fact it was a cyrix, the thing would take a good 30-40 seconds to play... Which became annoying extremly quickly (watching verticle redraw always driver me insane)... It''s just my normal browser of choice is Opera, and it prevents this kind of stuff (and the popups and large side ad it seems), so I would not have seen it otherwise.
It''s depressing in a way, though. I''d expect the majority of people who have actually visited ati.com because of those ads are mostly likly where they have missed clicked the close button (I managed this a good 5 times at least), so the marketing division at ati are likly going to be seeing much higher numbers from the ad than those who genuinly clicked the link... And enivitably get the idea that the ad was a success..
Recently, I feel ati have improved their image alot. I feel that they are now the ones pushing quality and respectability, yet things like this can quite easily destroy a reputation like that...
<-- smile :-)
Project-X