Commentary

Are Pop-ups the Problem?

Everyone seems to have a problem with pop-ups. People are starting to wonder if the problem they have with pop-ups is somehow demonstrative of a problem with the online advertising industry at large. Folks are thinking, hell, if I’m complaining about pop-ups; everyone else must be, too.

If you really think about it, however, you might realize that, sure, there is something inherently wrong with the way this ad format is being deployed in a general sense, but it isn’t any different than advertising in its most common forms.

Audiences complained when the first "commercial breaks" happened in TV. It used to be common that a product was "advertised" in-program, meaning that Jackie Gleason or Milton Berle or someone would actually talk about their sponsor, hold up the product, and other such things. I imagine when the first "commercial breaks" were introduced, folks were annoyed, and executives at ad agencies thought that nothing like that could possibly outdo their Life Magazine and Saturday Evening Post media schedule.

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But we've come a long way since the 20-second ad for a Bulova clock ran during a Brooklyn Dodgers game in July 1941. And no one seems to complain about the interruption to the programming. They might complain about its content, but not about its form. The only reason it is a big deal in online advertising is because we are MAKING it a big deal.

Decades ago, David Ogilvy said that if you want to figure out how to make your advertising so that it will sell product, just look at what the direct response marketers are doing. Well? What are they doing? They are buying pay-for-placement on search engines and they are running pop-ups and pop-unders. They aren't doing that because they want to create suffering for the masses. They are using these formats because THEY WORK.

If the Brand-inistas want more interesting, less intrusive, "quieter" advertising, then that is the kind of advertising they need to be buying and selling. But when publishers that speak ill of pop-ups as an ad format use them to promote their own product, that simply cannot be taken as a commitment to anything in advertising other than a commitment to that which works on behalf of the client, even if that client is itself.

And there really is nothing wrong with that as far as I can see.

The real issue with the pop-up isn’t the format so much as it is the method of delivery. I don't mind getting an Orbitz pop-up. It is the fact that I get 50 of them in one day that I find unbearable. With the proper attention and the minor use of some technology, pop-ups/unders wouldn't be such a big deal. The reason people are crying about them is a result of publisher’s desperate quest for dollars, and some publishers are letting advertisers do with them what they will because of that, rather than saying to these advertisers, "look, there are some guidelines we follow and as an advertiser, you are subject to these guidelines." Those parameters should include something like more sensible frequency distribution.

Of course, this assumes that it is the advertiser asking publishers to fire-hose their audiences. The alternative could be that publishers are overselling the site and need to run at Chinese water torture frequencies to make good on their contracts. This is a fairly easy issue to address, however, and is more a challenge than it is a real “problem” in our business.

The real problem in our business today is people who don't understand how advertising really works serving as its spokespersons. It isn't pop-ups or pop-unders that are hurting this industry. It is industry wags who don't know about advertising playing the role of the Oracle of Delphi that is ruining us. We are subject to predictions being made by staff writers of publications who don't even understand the past or present. How can they possibly be given the power they have over the future?

This industry owes more for the lack of adoption of the medium by advertisers to the Wall Street Journal than any number of pop-ups. Here is a publishing concern that has been very successful online, yet continues to print words that are against the online industry more than any other single source of information. Until we can figure out just what it is that the popular business press has against the medium, I fear it will be a long evangelist’s battle to see this medium fulfill its own promise as an ad vehicle.

And that includes pop-ups, by the way.

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