Ad Effectiveness Researcher Scraps Pop-Ups To Boost Its Own Effectiveness

Online users say they're sick and tired of pop-ups - and apparently, so is a leading purveyor of online ad effectiveness research. In an effort to improve cooperation rates, online market researcher InsightExpress Monday announced a new program intended to wean the industry off of pop-up messages, which have been the preferred method of recruiting users to participate in ad effectiveness studies.

In their place, InsightExpress is offering AdInvite - a new and far less intrusive method of recruiting Web users to participate in research. Instead of cluttering a page with pop-ups or pop-unders solicitations, AdInvite creates a rich media pitch that is contained within a Web page and is customized to fit within a site's organic content.

"Virtually anything you can do with an Eyeblaster ad you can do with this," says Lee Smith, CEO of InsightExpress. Smith said AdInvite was developed in response to the rising backlash over pop-up clutter, and that InsightExpress consulted with a number of Web publishers - including members of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Online Publishers Association - in its development.

Aside from irritating online users and exacerbating Web publishers, Smith said the pop-up solicitations were such a turnoff that many users would not participate in online research, in many cases making the findings of advertising effectiveness research less than representative of the overall user population.

With AdInvite, he said the invitations to participate in online research can be made directly within the body of a Web page, utilizing a variety of techniques ranging from simple text, banners, and balloons to other more dynamic versions. The goal, he said, is to reduce "non-response bias" by enticing a greater slice of online users to participate in the research.

Smith said that pop-ups are now the main tool used by the leading online researchers to recruit panelists. He added that InsightExpress has not yet reached out to his competitors at Dynamic Logic or Millward Brown - and he hopes they will follow suit in an effort to curtail online research clutter.

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