Imagining A World Without Ads
from the it's-not-so-much-the-ads... dept
As advertisers get increasingly desperate to get word of their product out everywhere, technologists are quickly coming up with better and better ways to get those ads out of our lives. The article talks about a guy who uses TiVo to ditch TV ads, a spam filter to ditch spam, pop-up blocking software to block pop-up ads, and a "privacy manager" from the phone company to block telemarketers. I'm sure many others have a similar setup. However, I think the real problem isn't the ads themselves, but their intrusive nature and their irrelevance. It's annoying to be interrupted and shown an ad for something that has nothing to do with you. The real problem is uncreative advertisers who think that the more people who see their ad (whether or not it pisses them off or is even remotely relevant) is better. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like advertisers are going to suddenly realize this doesn't work. They simply don't have the metrics - or misinterpret the ones they do have. For example, when people started ignoring banner ads, instead of realizing that the brute force method wasn't working, advertisers switched to the more annoying, more intrusive pop up ad.
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I would rephrase this to two separate statements. It's annoying to be interrupted. And it's also annoying to be shown an ad for something that has nothing to do with you.
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The sad part is it works
Why is that? It's called a saturation campaign - a national pizza firm tried it, and as incredibly annoying as it was, the statistics showed something like a 20% increase in sales when the high saturation ads ran.
It's a matter of the old adage: "Don't listen to what people *say* they do, watch *what* they do." Everyone complains about the ads running over and over - and yet sales went up.
SO if the ads were really annoying people? Wouldn't the sales drop? People claim "I'll never use this service or that service" but somehow the "negative" consequences never reach the bottom line.
In other words, the only way to stop this stuff is to stop responding to it. But that sounds vaguely communist, doesn't it?
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