• by Tom Hespos , August 5, 2002

Years ago, I wrote a column for another online marketing publication called "The Mom Test," in which I stressed the importance of conducting the occasional reality check by listening to comments from people not connected to the online marketing business. Often, I try to stay connected with the online consumer by asking people about their likes and dislikes with respect to their online experiences. It's a good exercise, and I think that all marketers should be eager to hear criticism from the consumers, aside from their usual focus group work.

Last weekend, I went to a friend's wedding near Hazelton, PA, where I knew almost none of the attending guests. I struck up a conversation with three gentlemen who worked as research chemists for a large pharmaceutical company. They asked me about what I did for a living, and I told them a bit about my job. As is the case almost any time I tell someone that I work for an online marketing firm, they had plenty of feedback for me. As I listened to their frustrations, I began to see a common thread running through all of them.

One of my new acquaintances related a story about his young daughter. His daughter's elementary school class was studying the animal kingdom and the child's teacher had assigned this man's daughter a report on the beaver. The man's wife and daughter elected to use the web to research the animal for the report. Needless to say, searches for "beaver" on the popular search engines yielded some inappropriate links, one of which the daughter accidentally clicked. Pornographic pop-up ads assaulted the child's desktop and she and her mother were forced to shut down their computer, as clicking one pop-up away spawned two or three more in its place.

Another gentleman was also a bit miffed about pop-up ads.

"I click them away over and over, but they never seem to get the picture," he said. "I get the same ad again and again."

"Which ads do you see the most often?" I asked.

"You know the ones on AOL when you sign in? Whatever it is, I click it away before I even see it," he said.

"Did you ever take a look at it to see what it is?" I asked.

"I keep getting an ad for a digital camera," he said. "I don't need a digital camera. I already have one."

The third man related a frustration of his own.

"I just had the kid from down the block come in and wipe my hard drive," he said. "My wife downloaded this program and it came with this virus that kept sending us pop-up ads."

"And she couldn't get rid of it?" I asked.

"Nope. We tried everything. The kid said you couldn't uninstall it. It just wouldn't go away."

After spending a few minutes addressing each of these problems, I walked away from the conversation. I felt a little ashamed about some of the practices have taken hold in our industry, but it was good to hear some frank opinions on the problems that Internet marketing is facing.

Notice a common theme running through the three problems that my new friends told me about? I see a few:

1. Reliance on the broadcast model - Each of the products that caused the problems detailed above use the broadcast model and treat all online users the same.
2. Foisting products on consumers that don't want them - Through observing behavior, online marketers have the ability to understand who wants their products and who doesn't. Why push things on people who don't want them?
3. Persistence to the point of being obnoxious - All three marketing methods continue to pursue potential customers who are clearly not interested in a relationship and who go out of their way to indicate so.

Porn site marketing has always ticked me off. It's easy to inadvertently stumble across pornography while searching for something else online. To me, the biggest frustration in encountering porn advertising on the web is the assumption on the part of the marketer that anyone who visits their sites is a sex-crazed maniac who can't get enough. How about verifying age and a base level of interest before spawning the many-headed undying hydra of pop-ups and consoles?

Direct response advertisers who run pop-up campaigns should consider extending reach by frequency-capping their ads. There is no reason in this day and age why consumers should be subjected to the same direct response messages over and over to the point of nausea. Instead, we can offer a pop-up message three times during the course of a single session or over the course of a month or so. If the consumer hasn't responded to a DR campaign by the third message, let someone else use the inventory and avoid the ham-handed persistence that turns consumers off.

And, for the sake of online consumers everywhere, can sites and software developers please stop doing business with adware and spyware companies that go out of their way to make their software difficult to uninstall? These companies are ruining things for all of us by teaching consumers that downloading software from the web is dangerous. As that perception propagates, it will hurt the businesses of software developers, especially smaller independent ones. It will also diminish the trustworthiness of the Internet in general, diminishing the effectiveness of the medium for all of us.