Online Advertising: Taking Over The Web?

from the where's-the-line dept

It seems that the big (non-"text ad") buzz in online advertising is "integrated advertising", which might better be called "sneaky advertising". The idea is to add the advertising to your website in a way that people barely even realize they're being advertised to. This can be as simple as making a few design changes, or (apparently) it can go all the way to slipping an advertiser's "sign up to be spammed" form in the middle of a regular signup page. That, it seems, is what Monster.com has done. In the middle of the signup process you come to a second registration page with all of your info pre-filled, making it easy for you to just hit "submit". Doing so, however, will sign you up for spam from Fidelity. Of course, this is all explained in the hard-to-read fine print, so they think it's all good. The writer suggests we're going to find more and more of this "hidden" advertising, since overt advertising doesn't seem to work any more. The question, then, is whether or not this is just "product placement" on the web, or something that's going to be a real problem?

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