I understand the purpose of advertisements, but their placement and proliferation of late is highly concerning.
Marketing analysts estimate Americans are blasted with 4,000-10,000 ads per day. Ron Marshall, president of Springfield-based Red Crow Marketing Inc., put that estimate to the test personally in a blog post dubbed “How Many Ads Do You See in One Day?” He reached nearly 500 ad exposures before finishing breakfast.
The point of Marshall’s blog ultimately was to suggest that if a company is seeking to compete in the marketing space, their messages must be planned and monitored closely to penetrate the massive cacophony of ads people continually view. While I agree with that sentiment in terms of business, I wonder just how much people can take. It’s important for businesses to function, but a brain is a computer and can only store so much data.
The internet is particularly intrusive when it comes to ads. Pop-ups, annoying sounds without warning and content that cannot be viewed before sitting through an ad are among the biggest offenders. You’ve also got your tile ads, banners, targeted ads and “recommended” searches on the likes of Google and Bing. Worst is malvertising, a term referring to ads that trick users into downloading harmful malware.
To rid themselves of distractions, many use Adblock, a free ad-blocking extension available for most browsers. There’s also Adblock Browser, an app designed to keep your web experience free of ads on smartphones.
Adblock does give you the opportunity to “whitelist” a website, allowing ads to show up. This is useful when you wish to support a website you visit often or a company you respect.
Lately, some websites have started fighting back. I’ve seen this mostly on news websites, including the Springfield News-Leader and Forbes. In these cases, the websites detect the use of ad-blocking software and put up a digital wall prohibiting users from entering the site unless they turn off the extension.
Adblock has, perhaps unsurprisingly, shot back with additional filters giving users the power to override such messages as, “We noticed that you have your ad blocker on. Your access to our content is blocked. To continue, please allow ads.”
To be fair, popular websites require ads to function. Facebook and Google, among other tech sites, need the money just like any other company, and news websites can’t rely only on subscriber revenue to keep the lights on. Springfield Business Journal is no exception, and following that logic, ads are crucial to my very way of life.
I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me. But I’m left in a bit of a hypocritical gray area where I continue to block ads on my personal time but rely on them professionally. I admit to having made buying decisions based on ads. Realistically then, ads are a necessary evil.
The way websites like Facebook deliver ads is arguably the least harmful to the human psyche. While I don’t necessarily agree with the idea of targeted ads – using search patterns to deliver similar content – I have found these types of ads to be the least intrusive.
Scrolling through my Facebook wall, it doesn’t seem too out of place for ads targeting my interests to be interspersed with content from my friends and family. Facebook does this in such a way that it looks like any other post, so it doesn’t pop out at me as being particularly annoying.
However, intrusive ads that keep content from showing up correctly or that actively kill enjoyment surfing the web have to go. Like pop-ups, these ads are old-school techniques that detract rather than complement.
One tip: Knocking people over the head with ad messages is not the way to go. That’s likely to detract from your marketing message rather than support it.
Web Producer Geoff Pickle can be reached at gpickle@sbj.net.
