• by Shankar Gupta , January 12, 2005

Adware company WhenU, in another effort to rehabilitate the somewhat damaged image of adware firms, is expected to announce today that its sales force will be brought in-house. The new sales team began work last week, taking over from the independent sales companies that had handled sales duties for the last five years.

WhenU Vice President of Advertising Paul Rothkopf, who joined the company in July, said that the move would help advance the New York-based company's goals of increasing the relevance of its ads while decreasing their frequency. He also stressed that in-house sales personnel would be better positioned to communicate these goals to WhenU's clients.

The independent sales teams, Rothkopf said, were not helping WhenU reach these goals. "They're not sitting in the company organization; they can't see the things we're doing all the time; they have other goals than we do," said Rothkopf. "Now everyone's are completely in line."

Rothkopf said the move was a step in WhenU's bid to clean up its image among consumers overwhelmed with pop-up ads and looking for someone to blame. "It's certainly a part of that [improving image] process. It's about practices," Rothkopf said. "When you go and you make that sort of commitment that we have to making sure that people understand the download process, you want to make sure that the clients understand that we're committing to the best practices, and those best practices are the best thing for them."

WhenU's adware, which provides functions such as optimizing a user's PC performance or syncing his desktop clock, is downloaded and installed on a consumer's hard drive. The adware is opt-in--the end user license agreement states at roughly the middle of the 1,367-word document that by downloading the software, the user agrees to receive ads based on his browsing behavior, keywords typed into search engines, and his local ZIP code or country code.

WhenU recently made headlines with consumer-friendly initiatives in December by establishing an anti-phishing program that would send its users ads when they arrived at the fraudulent sites. WhenU drew its list of fraudulent sites from antifraud sites www.fraudwatchinternational.com and www.antiphishing.org.

Ari Schwartz, associate director of privacy watchdog group the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that the move was a step forward for WhenU, but it still remained to be seen how much would change. "In theory it sounds like a positive step," he said. "But who knows how much of a difference it's going to make."