• by April 14, 2004

BE-WARE OF WOLVES IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING - We don't know what, if anything, the American Association of Advertising Agencies shelled out for new research on consumer attitudes about advertising that is a centerpiece of its annual management conference in Miami this week, but if it was more than $2, we think the money would have been better spent taking a ride on the New York City subway system. That way, ad folks could witness first-hand how consumers ignore advertising - transit ads, anyway. The research, from the esteemed pollsters at Yankelovich Partners, shows that "negative perceptions about advertising have substantially increased." Duh!

The Riff hasn't yet seen the results of the study, but according to an account published in today's New York Times ad column, 54 percent of consumers said they avoid buying products that overwhelm them with advertising and marketing, while 61 percent said they feel the amount of advertising and marketing "is out of control." The only question we have, is whether anyone in the business would be surprised about this? Our second question would be if they are, what the heck are they still doing in the business?

The bigger question though, was raised by another of the study's findings, that more than two-thirds of consumers (69 percent) are "interested in products and services that would help them skip or block marketing." Since those types of products seem to be coming out with increasing velocity - DVRs, online pop-up ad blockers, adware and spyware removal programs, etc. - we think the issue is no longer about advertising volume, but about advertising relevance and reciprocity.

J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich and author of the new study, alludes to as much in a blurb on the researcher's site touting these new insights. He says that in this ultra invasive environment, even "permission" is not longer enough to guarantee that a consumer will be receptive to an advertising message. And given the kind of clandestine permissioning used by some marketers - especially the online kind - we can understand why. Instead, Smith advocates a novel approach he says is guaranteed to make the relationship between advertiser and advertisee far more reciprocal: "empowerment."

"The shift that's long overdue is not to permission marketing but to a two-way model that allows consumers to dictate terms and in which marketers must earn the right to be heard," says Walker, emphasizing, "Permission is not enough. Empowerment and reciprocity are required, too. Empowerment means ceding control to consumers. Reciprocity means compensating consumers for paying attention." Wow! So simple. So ingenious. So out of left field for most advertising thinkers who spend most of their time figuring how to rest control from consumers - and in the process - only cause to infuriate and disenfranchise them.

Take one of the most insidious new forms of invasive advertising, so- called "maleware" (as in maleveloence). Some people call it "adware" others call it "spyware." The Riff calls it beware, because unwitting consumers need to beware of what they're opting into. To be sure, this is an extremely blurry area, not to mention rapidly shifting ground. The very terms adware (see item below) and spyware are subject to intense industry debates over the semantics. Whatever you call them, any application that takes over a consumer's personal possessions - in this case, a Web-enabled computer and its browser software - to launch advertising, redirect pages, overwrite home page preferences and install decidedly unfavorite sites into a user's "favorites" lists, is not the kind of marketing action that's likely to instill trust, a positive view of a marketer, or anything even closely resembling "reciprocity."

Sure, old-timers who are far more Web-savvy than the Riff have tried to explain this bargain: That users have to opt-in to these online ad applications and that there's usually some sort of quid pro quo in the bargain. But the Riff doesn't understand how such an arrangement could have been struck between a number of these fill-in-the-blank-ware providers and our 8-year-old daughter, who has absolutely no knowledge of downloading the apps on our family PC. The old-timers assure the Riff that she must have "opted in" and clicked through some kind of disclaimer statement - one that likely required an adult's authorization - but we still think that's a scummy tactic. But what really makes the Riff feel foolish is our complete and utter inability to remove some of these apps from our hard drive.

The old-timers tell us online advertisers and interactive ad shops "love" this stuff and they've even coined sophisticated sounding marketingspeak to elevate the practice. They call it contextual marketing. We call it hijacking our browser and it's exactly the kind of thing the Yankelovich research is speaking to, even if the practice is "40 times more effective" than conventional online banner ads, according to the insiders. We wonder what they mean by "effective?" If they mean effective at making consumers aware of an advertising message to irritable new proportions, we agree. If they mean effective at getting a consumer to be receptive and engaged in an advertiser's message, we disagree. It's time for marketing and advertising pros - online or off-liners - to stop talking to themselves and start talking to consumers. Otherwise, they're going to wake up some time soon and find out they're speaking to an empty room.

WILL THE REAL "ADWARE" PLEASE STAND UP - For countless posters in the Norton and McAfee chat rooms the term adware has become a generic for nefarious advertising software, but for some ad agencies, advertisers and at least one media buying management provider, it's meant something entirely different for years, before the Internet, in fact. AdWare Systems, which manages back-office media buying, trafficking and financial functions for ad agencies, with services that are similar to biggies like Donovan Data Systems or Datatech, has recently begun taking a stand on the generic use of adware in news stories about the online applications.

"We're trying to do this every time the word appears in an article," says Bob Bruce, director of business development ad AdWare, who, if that's true, may be spending more time writing letters than development business. When the Riff plugged the key word "adware" into Google today, it generated 1,060,000 references to the term. But Bruce takes the company's efforts to protect its trademark every bit as seriously as the biggest packaged goods players. In fact, he says AdWare was inspired by the inability of a major marketer, Hormel, to successfully police citations to the word spam, which used as a proper noun refers to a brand of glutinous canned meat, not annoying unsolicited commercial email.

Bruce says anti-virus purveyors such as Norton and McAfee are by far the worst adware trademark offenders, but it's unclear what the media planning and accounting system provider is doing about that. "I think they are generating a lot of the issues," says Bruce, adding, "People have run screen captures from the antivirus sites that say adware on it and forwarded them to us."

The attention - or notoriety, depending on how you look at it - has been both good and bad for AdWare Systems. The good news is that AdWare has become almost universally recognized. The bad news, is it's for the wrong reasons. It's not so much that Bruce and his team mind the confusion when people come up to them at trade shows because they are wearing AdWare t-shirts (they think the company produces anti-adware software), it's the more irate consumers (see item above) who've actually threatened to "come down here and shoot the place up."

"We've got a dilemma on our hands," says Bruce. "What bothers me most is the really nasty phone calls I get."

The only question the Riff has is, given the association with the word adware, wouldn't AdWare be better off calling itself something else? "We're looking into that," says Bruce. "Quite frankly, we're going to have to make some kind of adjustment here."