Echoing a comment here - adverts that look like SE content looks awful and can be potentially misleading.
If we are to have adverts, they need to be very clearly differentiated from the surrounding content.
The screenshot above is very much a surprise to us mods as it was to the rest of the members here, the mock-up was changed.
Due to the unique way in which Stack Teams works (which hosts the moderator teams content), any questions that are edited do not get bumped to the top - every question is ordered by the date of creation, not modification. This is the default sort order on Stack Teams, it can be overridden, but people miss doing that. In essence, the updated mock-up pictures were added by stealth and without anyone being alerted there was a change. I suspect that the change was made in good faith, but the way the platform works, no one would see the change unless they happened to open a question that's way down the page. Hence, no one knew to offer feedback for the updated image.
There was feedback in the moderator space that the adverts looked too much like the surrounding content and weirdly, this has been changed to make them look more like the surrounding content.
Changes of the mock-up from what the moderators fed back to:
The adverts had a shaded background that highlighted adverts. There was feedback that the shading wasn't clear enough. For some reason, the shading has now been removed.
The icon on the adverts used to be on the right, and the text was left-aligned (so that the text was in line with the vote summaries on the left hand side, further differentiating the advert due to the position of the text.
In the previous version, there was a speech bubble pointing at the advert indicating "No deceptive behavior". This speech bubble has now been removed. It's uncertain as to whether this means that there is now deceptive behavior. Or possibly the deceptive behavior is "add more camouflage".
| What moderators saw in mock-up v1 | What we fed back | What we ended up with |
|---|---|---|
| Adverts had a shaded background so that they were clearly different to the surrounding content | The shading was too light, wasn't clear enough and needed to be darker | The shading was removed. The speech bubble that used to say "Differently shaded background" has also been removed |
| The icon on the adverts was on the right hand side of the advert, making it obvious this content was different to the rest of the SE content. Text was also shifted to the left, making the difference even clearer | This was fine, no complaints on this | Icon was moved to the left, resulting in content that had the same layout as the rest of the SE content |
| Version 1 had a speech bubble pointing at the advert labelled "No deceptive behaviour" | This was fine, no complaints on this | This speech bubble has been removed. Possibly because there's an implicit admission that because the adverts now look very similar to SE content, the adverts could now be seen as "deceptive" |
In the previous mock-up, it was clear that the adverts were adverts, and now ambiguity and uncertainty seems to have been baked in.