The Rude and Obnoxious in Online Advertising

Writing by nick on Saturday, July 12, 2008 Comments (1)

With all of the local online advertising techniques available to businesses, we expect those businesses to choose the strategy that works best for their model, their product, and their business culture.

In a frenzy of advertising budgets and end-of the-quarter-profit-margin-reports, some ad execs go off the deep end and choose the most obnoxious and hated strategies that end up costing, not making, their company money.

When it works, advertising is an integral part of a internet consumer’s web experience: As users surf their daily news, sports, entertainment and business associated sites, they encounter ads. Entire business sectors are invested in understanding how much traffic was driven to the sites advertised. They measure the traffic flow; analytics, metrics on click through rates and anonymous profiling are a part of business.

To the detriment of the advertising industry, for years studies ignored or just didn’t look for how ads affected users and therefore the traffic. How many sites lost viewers because of rude advertising techniques?

Here are some of the most rude, crude, obnoxious and customer alienating techniques used.

1. Pop-Ups
2. Pop-Unders
3. An ‘X’ close box that doesn’t close, it just sends you right to the site
4. Ads that move with your curser, forcing you to read it
5. Ads that occupy the entire page
6. Ads that blink
7. Ads that take too long to load and stall the entire page

It is entirely possible, and most likely probable, that you have alienated your customers if you have used techniques such as those above. Customers surveyed have said that they avoid sites with guerrilla advertising and view it as highly intrusive.

If your intention is to gain customers and sell a product or a service, don’t go the way of the rude, it will back fire on you.

Comments (1)                      Category: Local Online Advertising                      

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Made Saturday, 12 of July , 2008 at 11:20 am

[...] The Rude and Obnoxious in Online Advertising [...]
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