On-line but Off-target

March 2003

Internet technologies have created a whole new channel for businesses to communicate with their customers and on-line marketing has grown at a huge rate over the last few years. As somebody who works in the marketing profession, I welcome the opportunities afforded by this new cost effective and interactive communication channel, but as a user of the Internet, I am becoming increasingly annoyed by those who are giving marketing online a bad name. The Internet is being used by advertisers who care little about market segmentation and targeting but who will advertise anything to anyone on-line simply because it is cheap and easy to do so. The Internet's power to communicate with millions at a press of a button often means that advertisers are placing much more of the focus on quantity rather than quality.

Let us look at two forms of on-line advertising which, because of their misuse, are blighting the Internet experience for the rest of us. Firstly, pop up advertising, and I know I am not alone here, a recent Gartner G2 report found that 78.3 percent of those people surveyed felt that pop ups were "very annoying". A pop-up is an advertisement that suddenly appears or "pops up" in the foreground of a web page. The advertiser hopes that you will visit the promoted web page by clicking on the window but in reality the majority of us click on the close button instead. The majority of pop ups are annoying because they are intrusive, they obscure the web page that you are trying to read so you have to close the window to move it out of the way. If that wasn't bad enough, I was recently the victim of a relatively new technique called the "kick through" whereby simply moving the cursor across a pop up box to close it - opens it -no clicking necessary.

There is also the deceptive pop up advert you know the one, the little grey box that looks exactly like a Windows system message with messages such as "Security Warning". Some computer users, conditioned to believe that messages appearing in these little grey boxes are important, are fooled into opening them and downloading software they don't require or didn't request.

The problem with pop-ups is that the more popular they become with the advertisers, the less popular they are with Internet users. The volume of pop ups that we have to endure during any single session is increasing at an alarming rate. The advertisers who use pop ups believe that the exposure and increased brand awareness is worth the possible risk of a tarnished brand name or a boycott of their product by frustrated Internet users. Other companies believe that a negative view of their product or company is never acceptable and will not use pop-ups.

However, pop-ups haven't yet reached the kind of proliferation of the biggest blight of the Internet - spam. Spam is unsolicited e-mail that you didn't ask for or didn't subscribe to and is often pushing adult sites or products with dubious claims from magic loose weight and look younger pills to buy a university degree. At present Jupiter Media Metrix estimates that the average person receives 700 junk e-mailings per year but predicts that this will rise to an average of 1,400 per person by 2006. Spammers advertise by e-mail because it costs them relatively little to send out huge volumes of e-mail and unfortunately it works. People, albeit a very small minority, actually respond to spam e-mails and if, out of 15,000 e-mails sent out, 2 people go a website and buy, it is considered to be a successful morning for the spammer.

The mailers of spam are totally indiscriminate in gathering names with volume rather than pre-qualification of the leads being their prime focus. They extract e-mail addresses of anybody who posts to a public newsgroup or chat room, they browse web pages and extract as many e-mail addresses as possible. Many people also fall into the trap of following unsubscribe instructions on a spam mailing when this is just a ruse set up by the spammer to confirm that the recipient is reading the e-mail and should therefore be sent even more spam.

Every receiver of spam pays with money, time and resources for something that he/she never asked for and does not want. Yes, it doesn't take long to delete a single e-mail but day in and day out deleting 30 or 40 of them can start to grind. Setting up filters to detect spam mail before they hit our inbox is time consuming and they may block some legitimate mail. Additionally ISPs have to transport all the bulk mail and in the end users have to pay for the service. The real downside to spam mail and this type of mass advertising is not only wasted time and money but that it is impacting on the Internet users willingness to communicate on the web. People are becoming reluctant to post messages to newsgroups, respond to surveys or subscribe to mailing lists for fear of receiving a deluge of junk.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against businesses communicating with clients and prospects via online advertising. There are many businesses working to shape productive, meaningful relationships with customers and prospects, using the Internet among other channels. There are also many excellent websites who owe their existence to the banner adverting revenues that allow them to fund their operation. Spam and pop ups, however, violate many of the rules of marketing and are having a negative impact on the Internet users experience. This is because they are very rarely targeted and hardly ever relevant. If a pop up advert is relevant it should elicit a desired response from a targeted audience rather than force them to click on the close box. Savy marketers have long recognised that the growth of long term customer loyalty to brands and products drives long term growth. These marketers are not willing to risk damaging their brands by sending out thousands of unwanted e-mails or placing contextually irrelevant pop ups. They are however overjoyed at sending e-mails to people who expressly say they do want it or using targeted advertising to qualified audiences to generate high response rates.

The marketing industry has taken steps to bring online advertising in step with the offline world and the Direct Marketing Association (www.dma.org.uk) has launched an Online Code of Practice. In an attempt to stem the flood of spam e-mails they have also introduced an e-Mail Preference Service (e-MPS), whereby individuals can register their name and e-mail address on a database; direct marketing companies will then match their lists against the e-MPS database and remove your name and e-mail address so that you don't receive any e-mail from them or companies that rent their e-mail lists. However, self regulation only works amongst the reputable companies and, as we have seen, many advertisers and spammers care little about damaging the Internet users experience and even less about the damage they are doing to the cause of online advertising. The only way to put a stop to intrusive advertising and the mountain of junk mail that is circulated every day, may be legislation or even charging for individual e-mails. Draconian measures I know, but at some point we may have to act to stop the misuse of a shared and valuable resource by a few, before they ruin the resource for us all.