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Pop Up Stupidity
from the don't-deserve-to-be-called-marketers dept
Marketing gets a bad name because too many people in the field of marketing don't understand what it really means. The point of marketing is not just to sell what you have on hand, but to find out what customers want or need, and to then provide it to them. However, instead of focusing on the customer's real needs, too many lazy marketers just focus on trying to convince customers that they need whatever the marketer is selling. This leads to annoying and intrusive advertising practices that may work in the short term, but do a great deal of damage in the long term. What's amazing, though, is that as lazy as these marketers are in terms of actually trying to give the customer what they want, they seem to spend an awful lot of effort trying to give them exactly what they don't want: ever more annoying and intrusive advertising. Now that pop-up blockers are almost everywhere, instead of realizing that people don't want (or need) pop-up ads, stupid marketers are working on more ways to get around the blockers. We've already written about systems that try to recognize a pop-up blocker and convert pop-ups to floating ads, but now many sites are figuring out ways to use pop-ups even when users clearly have pop-up blockers. This is going beyond lazy marketing into pure stupid marketing. You have someone who has made it clear they don't want what you're pushing, and you deliberately defy them and keep pushing it.
Reader Comments
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No Subject Given
no suprize
they still call me at home and send me junk mail
ask for my phone number when checking
id give all my money away till i had none to keep them from bothering me in an attempt to pick my pocket... but i doubt that would help anyway
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Re: No Subject Given
God, do I hear that.
That @#$@# screensaver company and the website that promotes Smileys have already found a way around Google toolbar's pop-up blocker. In fact, the screensaver company even had virus / adware program installed on my system secretly that was launching ads every time I shut down Internet Explorer. I finally figured it out, but I feel awful for the many low tech people who never will.
Amazing that no laws exist against this. Yet.
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Re: No Subject Given
Most advertising is intrusive...direct mail, telemarketing, tv commercials, etc. But in many cases it pays forhte content. Local TV and radio are free because of advertising. Much of the web content online is free because of advertisng. If people had to pay to listen to the radio and look at websites, I think they would welcome back advertising to keep it free.
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Re: No Subject Given
I agree with you that most advertising pays for content. But with tv and radio we've been accustomed to the fact that ads come with these media. The ads that we hate are the ones that bother us while we're reading mail, web articles, etc. pop-up ads are hated so much because of the fact that it does a very good job of disturbing us. I've experienced pops ups popping out every second and when i click on the "x" another 2 come out. I think Yahoo! has done a great way of minimizing disturbance caused by ads. little boxes or banners are all there is. no popping up.
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Re: No Subject Given
The problem is that the net isn't like TV.
When my experience is intruded upon by an ad, it usually means a few things:
1 - *I* had to pay to download the ad. I don't care if you pay one price...fact is, you have a limitted resource and it IS limitted in many ways (even if the package hides that from you) and I had to pay to receive the ad. This is more true with spam than popups, but it applies.
2 - Many many popups just keep coming ad-nauseum until your PC crashes. This isn't smart...I mean...am I going to purchase a product that just trashed my computer?
3 - spyware and adware, I know the article talks about popups but you mentionned many kinds of advertising, so I feel its a valid point here too...again, these things use MY computer resources to report on MY whereabouts usually without my knowledge. Again, it isn't the ad company who pays for this experience...I do!
The only acceptable ad in my opinion is the banner ad. It is the most similar to a tv commercial...its part of the media I'm browsing, I CAN ignore it if need be.
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To the advertisers
Pop - up
Delete.
No sale.
Got it ?
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Correction...
Item states: "Now that pop-up blockers are almost everywhere, instead of realizing that people don't want (or need) pop-up blockers, stupid marketers are...".
Should be: "Now that pop-up blockers are almost everywhere, instead of realizing that people don't want (or need) pop-up advertising, stupid marketers are...".
Summary:
We do need pop-up blockers. Because...
We do not need (or want) pop-up advertisments.
Marketers are stupid. Because...
They just don't get it.
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Re: Correction...
Oops. You're right. Fixed. Thanks for pointing that mistake out.
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Pop Up Stupidity
Even wackier is the fact there are still companies trying to convince people they can make a bundle with e-mailed newsletters, etc. (Not spam, bona fide publications.)
They just don't want to give up!
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