little ms. "sweet and innocent."

Monday, June 25, 2001
Advertising Hell, Part 2
"I've spent fourteen years being a whore for the advertising industry. The only way I could save myself now is to start firebombing." ~American Beauty

Why am I doing another sequel, you ask? Because from the day I put the first Advertising Hell weblog up, I kept finding more horrendous advertising things. As you can see, they continue to pile up. Will I do another of these in the future? Who knows? But given the amount I've found so far it seems likely.

Monday, June 25, 2001
They're bloody everywhere
"Through television and radio, people were forced to deal with the fact that what they saw and heard every day was a way to sell them something. Every one of us is essentially a walking advertisement. Most of us carry little electronic gizmos on us at all times-pagers, phones, and watches--anything we need to help us keep tabs on things. But every time we swipe a card or dial our phones we add to the growing file on each and every one of us."

"I used to know when ads would attack: during TV timeouts, in public transit shelters, on heavy-stock pages of magazines, grafted on to my grocery store cart. I could prepare.
I even managed to catch on to "hidden" advertisements. I learned that a Glamour spread on platform sneakers opposite a Skechers ad constitutes "advertorial," that Cast Away is even more of a vehicle for FedEx than Tom Hanks, that all the kids on Dawson's Creek are doubling as J. Crew models. It dawned on me that buying that cute stuffed chihuahua along with my seven-layer burrito is effectively paying Taco Bell for the privilege of advertising for them.
But advertisers fought back against my increasing ad awareness and resistance. Subtlety failed, so they decided to try the opposite - wrapping the world with ads.
I'll never forget the day I saw my first wrapped car, a new VW Beetle enveloped in a Jamba Juice ad. Gawking at the eyesore motoring away, I noted the URL painted on the back bumper: MyFreeCar.com. The site asks those willing to trade their souls for a free car to fill out an extensive questionnaire about where they drive, park, work, live, and vacation, and whether they would be willing to hand out product samples. Those who battle traffic with the right demographic may be lucky enough to get matched with a sponsor. In that case, the driver gets a brand new car "wrapped in an attractive advertisement" for her personal use for two years. She only pays for gas and insurance, but her movements are tracked by Big Brother (a global positioning system) to insure that she does, in fact, drive the number of miles she claimed.
A new Beetle runs about $15, 600, which means the advertiser is paying just over $21 a day for the two-year period for constant air-time on the road. It's not a bad deal, considering per-second television costs and the skyrocketing prices of billboard space. People are surprisingly amenable to ad encroachment if they get something for free. In an extreme case, a San Francisco man agreed to tattoo a local burrito joint's logo on his arm in exchange for a lifetime of free burritos. He swapped an unutilized patch of epidermis for decades of delicious and nutritious meals. But more commonly, people can get free Web server space if their sites are plagued by pop-up ads, or free Internet access if part of the screen is devoted to ads.
Revolutionary new advertising spaces are being discovered every day. There's the wrapped car's erstwhile sister, the "street blimp," which is nothing more than a billboard roving city streets on a flatbed truck. Coffee cozies and bar coasters now feature movie promotions. Screens have been installed at supermarket checkout lines so I can absorb commercials during those precious idle moments. Soon, all ATMs will be promoting products while my transaction is being processed.
The frightening thing is people seem to be accepting this "ad creep" (a term coined by Stay Free magazine) more and more. When San Francisco's Candlestick Park was renamed "3 Com" in 1995, there was an outcry, with fans and announcers refusing to acknowledge the change. But when the Giants got a new stadium five years later and it was dubbed Pacific Bell Park -complete with a giant Coke bottle for the kiddies to play in, the Old Navy "Splash Deck," and Webvan-emblazoned cup holders on the back of every seat - no one seemed to care anymore. Similarly, pre-movie advertisements in the theater used to solicit groans from American audiences, but now, while a few hisses persist, most people serve as the passive and captive audience advertisers dream of."

"Where yesterday flew the Stars-and-Stripes, today will fly the Brands-and-Bands. Some will wave it at the head of parades, some will swap it for Old Glory in front of the Wal-Mart or City Hall, some will unfurl it from highway overpasses. Some have even promised to paint it on the side of their houses. The spectacle of these flags snapping in the wind across the country and even abroad is sure to raise sparks. Traditionalists will be pissed ("A desecration!") But many may look at the flag and think, "Dammit if that ain't the truth."

Monday, June 25, 2001
Tainted schools again
"If you live in Jefferson County, Colorado, Pepsi donated $2 million to build a school football stadium-in exchange for exclusive rights to sell soft drinks in all 140 district schools and to advertise in school gymnasiums and athletic fields. That deal is estimated to earn the company $7.3 million over seven years. If your local high school is like 40 percent of secondary schools in the U.S., students get their current events from Channel One, a twelve-minute television news program with two minutes of commercials. One Texas school even rented its roof as advertising space aimed at airplanes flying overhead."

Monday, June 25, 2001
Science whores itself out too
"Some people feel that corporate sponsorship of scientific research amounts to the purchase of it. If hiring and firing decisions appear to turn on the interests of sponsors, for example, the independence of research may suffer. Such an incident occurred in April at the University of Toronto, which rescinded its offer of a job to David Healy. Dr Healy is well known for arguing that Prozac, an anti-depressant drug, raises the risk of suicide among depressives. The university's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where Dr Healy would have worked, receives funds from Eli Lilly, the makers of Prozac.
In the same year, a review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) examined articles about the health risks posed by passive smoking. The review's authors found that they could reliably predict what an article would conclude about the effects of passive smoking by looking at one simple factor: whether the article's authors had any financial affiliations with the tobacco industry. (No prizes for guessing which way results veered when they did.)"

Monday, June 25, 2001
You can't pee without an ad in your urine any more
"Looking to make a splash with young barflies across Canada and the U.S., Revelstoke has begun putting ads directly on the rubber nets that adorn the bottoms of urinals in local pubs wherever the rye whisky is sold. The ads actually appear as black patches on urinal nets until guys start doing their, uh, thing, at which point special heat sensitive ink transforms into zany branded massages like "Man who pee on electric fence receive shocking news" and "Never play leapfrog with a unicorn." Once the ink cools the text goes back to black.
The ad copy, Phillips says, is in a place where you are guaranteed that every guy must look. "They're without question the most talked about promotional piece that we've ever done," he says.
Talk about hitting your target... (or is that your target hitting you?) When you think of it, the urinal nets are a logical next step in a process that began long ago when the first business put its name on the side of a building. Advertisers have been trying to come up with new innovations to get in consumers' faces ever since. From billboards to sidewalk graphics to video terminals over toilets - the goal is to nail them with the message when they're looking.
But until now, there was always the distraction factor - the possibility that the consumer will look away and miss the message. There is really only one place that all men are guaranteed to look at precisely the right moment and thusly Revelstoke has given new meaning to the concept of reading in the john."

Monday, June 25, 2001
Bad bookflap advertising
"Hector's half-brother Spud -- a down to earth dairy farmer [oh, good -- I hate those hoity-toity dairy farmers] and neighbor of the two -- finds the bodies shortly before the police discover that Spud and the wife were having an affair." A double murder sounds juicy, but am I going to have to read descriptions of somebody named Spud having sex?"

Monday, June 25, 2001
This article's not on telemarketing, but the rant about it is nice
"Telemarketing is so universally loathed that you can't even mention the subject without eliciting waves of moans and laments. Yet there's not that much we can do about it. You can laboriously tell each of your banks, telecom companies and other service providers not to resell your name and number -- but who has the time to figure out how, and who knows whether they'll actually comply? You can say to the hapless callers, "Not interested -- and take me off your list!" but you'll never be sure they've done so -- or you might get a friendly reply, as I once did, like, "I can't, because you're fat!" (I don't think that's true, but hey, even if it were, how would he know?) You can turn off your phone, but then you sort of defeat the purpose of having one in the first place."

Monday, June 25, 2001
And then there's the movies.
"What about that awesome trailer? It was tailored specifically to appeal to you. (Your date saw another version altogether.) Those stories in the paper? Placed by publishing arms of the same parent corporation that owns the film production company. (Ditto for the TV spots.) And those glowing reviewer quotes in the ads? Um, let's just say they weren't exactly accurate quotes. In the case of a recent high-profile bombshell dropped by Sony Pictures, in fact, they were simply made up out of thin air.
You, dear moviegoer, are the unwitting victim of Hollywood's relentless Hype Machine, a complex and mysterious contraption that you pay for, like it or not.
Increasingly, consumers are being massaged and manipulated by crack teams of mass marketers who conspire for months--or, in the case of multimillion-dollar "event" films such as Pearl Harbor, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Planet of the Apes, Jurassic Park III and Lord of the Rings, for a year or more--to make sure potential audiences choose their movie on opening weekend.
Why all the fuss? Because hundreds of millions of box-office dollars are hanging in the balance--not to mention the careers of high-price producers, directors, actors, writers and studio honchos."

"Producers routinely make multiple trailers emphasizing different aspects of the story to appeal to various audience segments. "The first is usually a rock-'em sock-'em designed to bring in young males for the opening weekend," says one studio marketing expert. After that, the studio might release a trailer that emphasizes the film's romantic aspect in order to appeal to a female audience.
doctored, your hunch is right--it happens all the time. With a nip and a tuck, the line "It's a roller-coaster ride to nowhere" magically becomes "It's a roller-coaster ride!"
Disney marketers knew the action-packed Pearl Harbor would pull in the young male audience, and females would be lured Hartnett. But savvy guerrilla tactics helped them reach an older market segment that statistically attends only one or two movies a year.
"We used our natural resources," reveals an inside Disney source. "Because there are Pearl Harbor survivors in every region of the country, we contacted all of them and then went to their hometown newspapers and arranged [stories]. No one in Boise, Idaho, cares what Kate Beckinsale thinks, but people do care about the guy next door who was actually there."
There is a very, very troubling relationship between the news media in popular culture and large corporations that control various kinds of products and market them through the media," says John Belton, professor at Rutgers University and editor of the book Movies and Mass Culture. "Years ago, you would lift your eyebrow at why the New York Times decided to cover this particular film opening this week, and realize there was a press agent somewhere exercising connections. Today, it's often because the media outlet and the movie studio are owned by the same conglomerate."

Monday, June 25, 2001
The troubles with television advertising
"It's a branded world, and reminders of what channel you're watching every eight minutes or so just don't cut the mustard anymore -- instead, a transparent network logo in the corner of the screen does the dirty work. Constantly. Over the show. Sometimes in color. And that has some people pissed off. What I want to know is, when are advertisers going to start demanding the same space?"

"Every day the Logo War intensifies. The networks are adding the time, temperature, and channel number to logos that are getting bigger, multicolored, and even animated! They're moving to all four corners of the screen and rotating between multiple logos. That's right folks, the logo has become more important than the actual program! In fact, they have stooped so low as to put colored logos on black and white shows!"

"Because of the way that television was set up as an ad-supported mass medium using public airwaves to reach as wide an audience as possible, networks always have been careful not to offend any segment of that audience. Sometimes this is referred to as the lowest common denominator, which accounts for shows such as Becker.
He played the On Golden Pond clip out of context three times and the expletive used by a teenage character wasn't bleeped. But when Dave said it on the same broadcast, it was.
Departing the mausoleum complex in northern India is as close as most of us will come to experiencing the lifestyle of a global celebrity, except that in this case the swarming throngs of shrieking maniacs are trying to get our money, not our autographs. They are peddling wooden snakes, postcards, cheap models of the Taj, eerie food products of dubious calibre. And they are relentless: To this crowd, a firm "no" means "Yes, thank you, I would love to purchase your product if only you would be so kind as to first embrace or perhaps fondle me and then repeat your pitch, much louder and at closer range."
But these days, you needn't travel the perilous road to Agra to be pestered in such a shrill and irksome manner. Simply tune to U.S. network television during prime time, the new home of hard-sell hucksterism. To combat the increasing fragmentation of the TV audience, executives have in recent years fiddled with several gimmicks designed to retain viewers. At first, the changes were benign to the point that many went unnoticed. Most prime-time series, for instance, abandoned theme songs for fear that the gazing masses might stray if not immediately smacked upside the head with a dramatic confrontation or an amusing sight gag. Network bosses toyed with eliminating the commercials between sitcoms, hopeful that folks would be less likely to paw the remote. They even started broadcasting programs as much as a minute before the scheduled time (at 8:59 p.m., for instance, instead of 9 p.m.) to mollify in viewers the urge to meander.
This tinkering has not done the trick. Like the Devil in that old Caramilk commercial, the network masters -- confronted with ever-eroding ratings -- stare coldly at their underlings and cackle: "Not enough!" The result is that we, the viewers, are now being put through Hell. Farewell to good, old-fashioned cajoling as a marketing tactic. It's badgering time!
So we get the network logo in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen: Wouldn't want them to forget what channel they're watching! And we get the end credits squished to one side of the screen to allow for blaring, fast-talking plugs: Wouldn't want them to think we've got dead air on next! And now we've got little reminders popping up while we're actually viewing a program: Wouldn't want them to forget they're watching Friends! Or that Just Shoot Me is coming up later! Or that asses will be so fired if they flip over and watch CSI, those fickle bastards!
Even the cutesy coaxing of episode promos has been replaced with a more insistent, more desperate tone, making the spots sound less like invitations and more like ultimatums: The episode you simply can't miss! The show everyone will be talking about! A very special episode that's so very special it's extra-very-special! It's only a matter of time until NBC's Must See TV lineup becomes NBC's Watch or as Satan Is Our Witness You Will Be Shunned by Your Peers and Subjected to Repeated Beatings in the Street lineup."

"Now an average day of television viewing mandates a veritable library of reading. With the national network logos, local logos, network promotions, scrolls, crawls, drop-ins, explainers, in-show ads, news text and, of course, fine print, there's no open space left on the screen for the ever-shrinking pictures. No wonder televisions are getting bigger.
And pictures, if I recall correctly, was the original appeal of this whole "television'' thing."

"Studies have shown consumers feel television was the most cluttered of all the different advertising mediums," the ACA's Bob Reaume says in a phone interview from Toronto. "This isn't necessarily true, but this is their perception of it."
Viewers who are sick to death of commercials -- which occupy up to 20 minutes of hour-long programs due to exemptions to the 12-minute rule -- practise what Reaume calls "commercial avoidance."
He says 50 to 69 per cent of viewers refuse to sit through commercials; they leave the room, channel surf, do their bills. Furthermore, people aren't even recalling the commercials they do watch." Gee, WHAT A SURPRISE. I'm telling ya, commercial fatigue.

Here's a ridiculous story for you, one I actually heard years ago in some long-forgotten corner of the Net and found a different version (but same story stuff!) in recently. If someone offers you the chance to see some TV pilots, watch out.: "The first thing they had us do was go through a booklet of "prizes" and circle the ones we most wanted to receive. This process was very similar to picking your favorite brand of peanut butter, nail polish, and cake frosting, so it was pretty clear that they were going to show us commercials in what they called a "natural viewing environment", assuming you always watch television in a darkened hotel conference room, surrounded by strangers. However, they couldn't just admit that they were here to test the power of commercials, so they tried to maintain the illusion that we were going to see potential television series. And since they didn't have us sign anything (and even forgot to ask me what my profession was, which is the only reason the powerful Shoemaker's Union isn't breaking down my door right now), I am now prepared to review the terrible shows they showed us.
At any rate, the commercials shown us during the drama were for medical problems. They believed we suffered from bladder control problems, depression, acne, armpit odor, and fallen arches. By this time, I'd figured out that they were going to give us another "prize booklet" at the end of the evening to see if the products we wanted had magically changed through the power of advertising. My clever plan was to select things as far as possible from the advertised products. Yeah, I stuck it to the man, all right. That'll learn 'em.
The second show was a half-hour sitcom called City that looked for all the world like an actual pilot." (From 1990!) "So it looked like an actual pilot, but it looked like an actual pilot that was at least a decade old, what with the Teddy Ruxpin jokes.
Judging by the IMDB entry, the good people at Television Preview have been showing City since at least 1999, so I expect that they picked it up for a song after it wasn't picked up. And it wasn't terrible, but it's clearly not going to be made into a series at this point."

Now we're going to get into offensive advertising, joy of joys.

Like condoms. Oh, wait, those aren't really allowed on the air much, so do they count? "CBS and NBC have since joined Fox in allowing condom ads, yet the policies are so restrictive that prophylactic manufacturers don't bother making many. ABC, the WB and UPN don't allow paid condom advertising, according to the health-oriented foundation.
A Fox executive told Kaiser that another problem with condom ads is that other advertisers don't want their commercials airing near them, further limiting the chances they will get on the air.
In a survey conducted by Kaiser this spring, 71 percent of Americans said they favored allowing condom ads on TV. About half of those people say the ads could run at any time; others say they should be restricted to late at night.
The survey found that while one-quarter of respondents oppose condoms ads on TV, one-third oppose beer advertising. " HAH! But they won't take THOSE off any time soon. Or stuff like this one either. And then there's whoring during TV shows. "It seemed like such a simple plan: Have Barbara Walters and her pals on The View drop a few references to Campbell's Soup, maybe make the audience participate in a "fun" soup-sipping game while Campbell's executives look on approvingly, then pocket a nice chunk of change."

"Advertisers who want a sponsorship package -- which includes up to two 30-second commercials on each show and product placements -- will have to buy both Survivor 3 and Survivor 4. (Survivor 3, set in Kenya, runs for 14 weeks starting in October, while Survivor 4 begins in March.) That's a commitment of $25 million to $28 million from each advertiser who signs on."

Especially since from what I've heard, Burnett plans to make the entire show about advertising whoring. Joy oh joy, more Aztecs and shit.

And now, the commercials can stalk you. "NBC is trying a scheme that uses the audio port on your computer to display a link to the advertisement currently showing on the television," Hexjumper writes. "This is, apparently, to 'save viewers from having to write down an Internet address during a show and then wade through the site to find the relevant page.'

"Cable and satellite giants are installing technology that will enable them to zap targeted TV commercials to different homes based on the occupants' age, gender, ethnicity, income and other personal details, including what shows they watch. If neighbors are watching "West Wing" at the same time, the household with young parents will see an ad for Pampers diapers, while the retirees next door learn about the bonding strength of Fixodent. Wealthy homeowners might get ads for Nordstrom, while lower-income renters see commercials for Wal-Mart. Eventually, companies hope to refine the technology to target different viewers in the same family. They might send ads for the new PlayStation 2 to the teenager's room while reserving the life insurance pitch for mom and dad in the den.
AT&T, the nation's biggest cable operator, plans to test such "addressable advertising" this fall on 30,000 customers in Aurora, Colo., who have upgraded to digital cable, which makes the targeting technology possible."

Monday, June 25, 2001
And then there's the Internet, which we all know is pretty screwed :/
"Today, following last year's Great Internet Disillusion, people no longer care what information wants. Information can go inform itself, because information providers want to get paid. Investors are suddenly asking for some plausible theory of how and when a Web site might be expected to make money. And meanwhile, the two most popular answers to those questions-a) advertising; and b) don't bother us about that now, can't you see we're busy?-are met with increasingly impolite skepticism. "You're fired" is how many skeptics now analyze the situation."

Monday, June 25, 2001
Bleah on Premium
"The difference between Salon's Premium and non-Premium versions is not that great. In fact it would be tempting to say that the entire Salon Premium experience is, at this early stage, not that great. Partly this is because once you've logged in, it's not very clear if what you're looking at is Salon Premium or Salon Regular."

And now they're starting to have ads like this one, which to me seems downright snotty and kinda pisses me off. Insulting the customers is the first no-no of advertising, after all: ""I'll live without Salon Premium," you may say. "I'm willing to be the kind of person who spends money on newspapers and chewing gum and pore-cleaning nose strips and other marginal satisfactions while my favorite columnists and reviewers and cartoonists and Camille Paglia go completely without my support."
If you said and thought those things you'd be wrong. First of all, averting your eyes from those blinking, pinwheeling, fluorescent (and possibly radioactive) banners is not only mind in denial. The better you are at denial the more likely you'll be taken advantage of in your personal and professional life. Those banner-shaped holes in your awareness are a handicap a 21st century consciousness can ill afford." Oh yeah, and threatening the dog.

Monday, June 25, 2001
The future of the web: Weblogs?
"Internet developers (like those of us that day at Go.com) became so concerned with "personalization" that we forgot that personality is what drew people to websites in the first place.
Over the past two years, a wave of individual personalities -- something between editors and conduits -- has emerged, eager to curate the world via sites called "web logs." These one-person human portals are cultural antennae, a vital part of the constantly shifting terrain of information online. By definition, a web log (or its contraction, blog) is a collection of links on a single page chosen by its author. Some blogs are incredibly personal, just a hair shy of exhibitionistic, but others are as civic-minded as a newspaper. All are unpredictable, sampling the Internet with restless curiosity and personality to burn. These folks are the merchants of buzz. No commercial site could afford to be so porous, pointing its visitors off-site as soon as they've arrived; MSNBC and NBCi make their money based on how long visitors stick around. But web logs succeed based on how relevant they become, how intellectually adventurous they can be. And they don't seem to care about money, or at least have no real prospect of making any.
As blogs establish themselves in the information hierarchy, the proprietary news media might end up competing with the better-networked, smaller-scale parasites living off of them. As Dorogoff points out, MSNBC's response is to make every page a front page, heavy with "rather sophisticated interlinking" to other articles on the site and, of course, advertising. MSNBC has started using interstitial ads -- big, garish graphics that appear and disappear before their stories come up -- and ads that run in the middle of a column of text to capture those readers who enter the site through a side entrance. Who wants to dig for stories in a mess of ads, graphics, and "sophisticated interlinking" when the same information can be scouted and simply arranged by an editor as fixated on the subject matter as you are?
Romenesko, whose venture is funded by The Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, is great at what he does. He sorts through 150 sites and dozens of e-mail tips a day. (About four or five of these leads end up as stories.) But Romenesko's MediaNews is also successful because it is the kind of site you can check ten times a day without being assaulted by ads.
Part of the allure of blogs is how their creators share themselves and what they know spontaneously, outside of a profit motive. Blogs are a loose reflection of their readers, which is how we get hooked in the first place: They're small, intimate, and enormously wide-minded. In other words, people-size. And as long as they exist, they'll represent the ultimate irony: They're nonbusinesses threatening their big-business competitors."

Monday, June 25, 2001
Banner ads: their effectiveness and/or lack thereof
(Note: When looking at this page in Netscape, the bottom links went befouled. Probably better to use in IE or some other thing.) "People ignore them. Eyes-scan studies suggest that most web users, especially experience ones (those that have spent more than six months online) simply do not see web banners. They will scroll them out of site, having not viewed them on the page.
These studies also suggest that animations are also ignored by web pages. This begs the question, why are animated banners so popular?
The third obstacle is the fact that people don't click through banners. Yes, as small percentage of people will inevitably click though to visit the advertised site. Most won't. It is simply not worth their time, and they have come to the original page to view it's content, not to browse on through." (Which I think is a definite problem with the whole idea.)
"Targeting the audience is more possible on the web than on the side of the bus. So why are buses more effective? Web banners expect to capture an audience with ineffective methods to produce unrealistic results. The click-through focus should be alleviated.
Much like bus banners, people will simply ignore web banners, or register them subconsciously. They cannot stand alone to get people to buy a product."

Now I love Mighty Big TV, but their new ad policy disturbs me. "You may remember, back in The Olden Days that the ad was in a SEPARATE FRAME at the bottom of the page.
This frame automatically refreshed itself once per minute. If you spent 15 minutes reading a recap you netted us 15 ads.
Now that way of doing ads was an OLD OLD method used by ChickClick and is NOT attractive to advertisers. In fact you can't get ad representation unless you have ads INSIDE the story pages. These are called EMBEDDED ADS. So we have to change it. There's no 'ifs and or buts' about it. It's gotta happen.
If we keep recaps on three pages we'll get 3 ads where we used to get 15. So that's why the recaps are spread out over more pages. Our formula is (more or less) one page in Word to one page on the web.
We liked the old ad method because it rewarded sites based on TIME SPENT not PAGES VIEWED but it's out of our control and it's oh so many gallons of spilt milk at this point.
This is not the end of ad changes either. We'll be adding other sizes and formats as the advertisers demand it. These may include 'skyscraper' ads, controlled pop-ups, interstitials, mini-sites." *sigh*

Monday, June 25, 2001
Banner ads: their effectiveness and/or lack thereof
(Note: When looking at this page in Netscape, the bottom links went befouled. Probably better to use in IE or some other thing.) "People ignore them. Eyes-scan studies suggest that most web users, especially experience ones (those that have spent more than six months online) simply do not see web banners. They will scroll them out of site, having not viewed them on the page.
These studies also suggest that animations are also ignored by web pages. This begs the question, why are animated banners so popular?
The third obstacle is the fact that people don't click through banners. Yes, as small percentage of people will inevitably click though to visit the advertised site. Most won't. It is simply not worth their time, and they have come to the original page to view it's content, not to browse on through." (Which I think is a definite problem with the whole idea.)
"Targeting the audience is more possible on the web than on the side of the bus. So why are buses more effective? Web banners expect to capture an audience with ineffective methods to produce unrealistic results. The click-through focus should be alleviated.
Much like bus banners, people will simply ignore web banners, or register them subconsciously. They cannot stand alone to get people to buy a product."

Now I love Mighty Big TV, but their new ad policy disturbs me. "You may remember, back in The Olden Days that the ad was in a SEPARATE FRAME at the bottom of the page.
This frame automatically refreshed itself once per minute. If you spent 15 minutes reading a recap you netted us 15 ads.
Now that way of doing ads was an OLD OLD method used by ChickClick and is NOT attractive to advertisers. In fact you can't get ad representation unless you have ads INSIDE the story pages. These are called EMBEDDED ADS. So we have to change it. There's no 'ifs and or buts' about it. It's gotta happen.
If we keep recaps on three pages we'll get 3 ads where we used to get 15. So that's why the recaps are spread out over more pages. Our formula is (more or less) one page in Word to one page on the web.
We liked the old ad method because it rewarded sites based on TIME SPENT not PAGES VIEWED but it's out of our control and it's oh so many gallons of spilt milk at this point.
This is not the end of ad changes either. We'll be adding other sizes and formats as the advertisers demand it. These may include 'skyscraper' ads, controlled pop-ups, interstitials, mini-sites." *sigh*

Monday, June 25, 2001
Ways to get rid of pop-ups
Here too.

Monday, June 25, 2001
And by now you all know about the damn X10 ads
"It's peculiar to find a firm openly admitting how bothersome its own marketing is and offering a remedy."

"A pop-under ad slips clandestinely onto a Web surfer's unseen --until the surfer closes down browser windows. Then the pop-under ad becomes apparent, filling most of a computer screen.
If you spend much time at all on the Web, you've probably encountered pop-under ads for Seattle-based X10's $80 wireless video cameras.
``The industry thinking is that banner ads are too subtle,'' says Jim Nail, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. ``Consumers don't really see them or they've trained their eyes not to see them, some marketers believe. So, they're pushing for more intrusive ads --'big box' and tall 'skyscraper' ads. And in the current online ad environment, the media companies will do whatever advertisers want them to do to get the money.''
How intrusive can the ads get without chasing away the readers? How much will readers tolerate to get free content?
Some people argue that pop-under ads are less intrusive to Web surfers and, therefore, more likely to command attention. Others say that there's not much value in ads that go unseen until surfers decide they have something else to do and start to shut down their browsers."

"Most of [X10's] traffic is not voluntary," Media Metrix analyst Max Kalehoff told the E-Commerce Times. "But it's still legitimate traffic. It still represents people experiencing their site."
Kalehoff said that the impressiveness of X10's traffic level is tempered by the fact that even those Web surfers who immediately close the new browser window featuring the X10 advertisement without reading it are counted as visitors. In fact, 95 percent of the traffic to X10 during May came from the pop-up and pop-under ads. Kalehoff said it is nearly impossible to judge from the outside how many people actually browsed through the site or bought anything online after seeing the company's ads.
"It's working as far as traffic goes," Kalehoff said. "Sales are another question."

"Internet advertising can't make up its mind whether to be clever or obnoxious these days.
Three black crows flew across Yahoo's home page last month and pecked at seeds that dissolved to reveal a Ford Explorer. The Web commercial could have been fun but it took too long -- a full 10 seconds -- and froze the home page the entire time so you couldn't go about your business online. Thank goodness Yahoo let the crows feast for only one day.
The New York Times on the Web, in addition to pop-unders, is doing fly-bys. A black jet is buzzing its business section this week, appearing on the left and flying across the page, casting a shadow on the text below. It disappears and reappears as a speck in the distance, then zooms in for a landing, nose pointed straight at the viewer. When it stops the ad proclaims: "The fastest database has landed. Introducing Oracle9i."
The Times is limiting each visitor's exposure to one pop-under ad per day, but many sites running the X10 ads have no such cap. Active Web users can find themselves clicking a dozen or more times in a single browsing session just to close X10 ads."

So desperate are they to make money that otherwise conservative Web sites are using bigger, more-obtrusive ads to catch buyers' eyes--and the early results show that such ads are effective.
For example, Media Metrix reported Wednesday that X-10's ad campaign helped the company become the No. 5 Web property in May, ahead of sites such as Excite and Amazon.com.
Eager to please, publishers are engaging in a wave of experimentation that has spawned larger interactive banners and pop-ups on sites such as the NYTimes.com, Fortune, MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo. Others use streaming video and audio banners, and the most extreme offer a host of free-form technologies that let marketers command an entire Web page.
In one recent example, Ask Jeeves this week transformed its home page to a tropical theme for two days to promote 20th Century Fox's video release of the Tom Hanks hit "Cast Away." Among other things, an animated volleyball--a prop in the movie--bounced across the company's home page as an added attention-grabber.
Some of the new formats are generating much bigger click-through numbers. Pop-up ads, for example, which launch windows on top of Web pages, on average generate 5 percent to 6 percent click-through rates, said John Bohan, chief executive of online ad network L90. Pop-unders of the sort used by the NYTimes.com generate 2 percent to 3 percent click-throughs, he added.
Just as with banners, however, analysts predicted those numbers will drop as the novelty factor wears off.
"Any publisher that promotes these ads based on click-through rates is digging a grave they can't get out of," said Marissa Gluck, online advertising analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix. "It's the same problem with banners that we've seen for the last five years: With greater ubiquity, there's always a decrease of response. And click rate isn't the best metric of success."
"These ads are kind of free form," Iconocast's Tchong said. "You're going to see a heck of lot more ads that float over the screen as par for the course--it's just something that we'll have to get used to."

I just love this tone of "You have to put up with every kind of ad we throw at you. Ha ha!"

Monday, June 25, 2001
Now you can't send e-mail without getting spam IN it.
"Reva's Admail solution enables ISP's and email providers to generate revenue from their email services by providing an effective channel for advertisers to deliver content rich marketing messages to a demographically targeted audience.
It works by intercepting regular email traffic as it enters an email provider's system and inserts advertisements into the body of the email message based on the recipient's demographic profile." Or as Plastic put it, "Dear Mom, Summer Camp Is Fun And... ***CLICK HERE FOR HOT ACTION!!*** ...Love, Jimmy" Now that's just a big ol' invasion of privacy. Bleeech.

Monday, June 25, 2001
For your amusement, spam poetry
"The Spam Poets at SatireWire have some actual samples for you to peruse, with scintillating titles such as This is NOT Spam, Why Don't You Trust Me?, and the catchy Spam Rap. And each of these poems, every last one of them, was created using ACTUAL PHRASES from ACTUAL SPAM EMAILS.
This was no picnic. It's not easy to wax poetic when you're saddled with lines such as "Your name was obtained from an Opt-In Mail List," or "I sent out 500 letters and in just 3 months received $2,430,988 in one dollar bills!"

Monday, June 25, 2001
And then there's the most evil page on the net
(Note: This link does not link to the actual evil page itself, but to a page that will tell you all about the evil crap it springs on you.)

Monday, June 25, 2001
Hope for the Internet?
"It's been a long time since software companies and dot-coms (you remember them; it's a Web thing) sent out T-shirts.
In fact, for a while there, dot-com T-shirts got to be so common they became uncool: You wouldn't even wear 'em to work out at the gym.
Then came the slowdown into downturn, into not-a-recession, into a sagging economy, into "C'mon Al, cut the rates!" First, the tchotchkes disappeared, along with the gradual decline and then total absence of T-shirts.
And then the companies themselves vaporized, although some industry observers firmly believe most of them could've stuck around another month or two with money saved from not giving away so many T-shirts.
You want bellwethers? T-shirts are a bellwether, except maybe in rainy weather, but it's difficult to remember seeing any free dot-com parkas.
But now! Now a T-shirt has been sighted. Like a phoenix. Like the first twig to sprout after a forest fire. Like pitchers and catchers reporting. Yay, hallelujah! Like life itself. And no doubt it's coming soon to a geek's back, perilously near you.
The company sending out this T-shirt shall remain nameless simply on the principle that contrived PR efforts should never succeed. The company's competitor also shall remain nameless because none of the hundreds of experts interviewed for this piece had ever heard of it."