(eMarketer)
- These are the times that try surfer's souls. In a down economy,
advertisers are willing to try things they ordinarily might not do.
Websites, also pliable in light of economic realities, are only too
happy to oblige. Which brings us to the proliferation of
interstitial or pop-up ads that everyone has noticed on the web.
The interstitial is a separate window of advertising that pops
open spontaneously, blocking the site behind it. It is designed to
grab consumers' attention for the few nanoseconds it takes them to
close the window. The danger of course is that the attention
achieved is not necessarily positive notice. These ads are often
perceived as an annoying intrusion. A slight variation on this is
the "pop-under" ad
that immediately goes behind the active screen but stays open until
the browser window is closed.
A recent study
has confirmed that pop-up ads are more than just a minor annoyance.
Not surprisingly, the study found that pop-up ads are 50% more
likely to be noticed than banner ads.
Regardless of people's feelings about the actual content of the
ads, the ads are 100% more likely to be considered intrusive.
Moreover, given the somewhat lascivious history of pop-up ads,
companies that use them are not often perceived as market leaders.
In light of all this, it makes one wonder why companies use them
at all. The flip response from marketers and site owners alike seems
to be that pop-up ads are at worst an inconvenience that surfers
better get used to if they want free content. Let's try an analogy.
If an ad popped up right in the middle of a favorite network sitcom
-- obscuring the picture and possibly even the sound -- (and with
the advent of iTV, this is not at
all far-fetched), how many viewers would consider that simply the
cost of free television?
What the pop-up boosters fail to grasp is that the internet is
truly like no other form of communication. Television and radio are
linear mediums in that viewers work their way from beginning to end.
This puts control in the hands of the marketer to decide how the
advertising messages will be presented.
Think about it. Prime time television or drive time radio
typically washes over the recipient - there is no jumping around.
The information is pushed. But surfers are actively engaged in
finding something -- be it information or entertainment. Anything
that interferes with the process of getting to that point,
especially a noisome form of advertising such as a pop-up, is not
likely to be well received.
Of course, there is still a silver lining. In a buyer's market
such as this one, many will feel free to experiment. In the world of
online advertising where we still have much to learn, this can only
work to our advantage.
You can e-mail Jonathan Jackson, eMarketer's eAdvertising
analyst, at mailto:%20jjackson@emarketer.com
with comments, suggestions and questions. He recently wrote
eMarketer's eMail
Marketing Report and eAdvertising
Report.
