Death By a Thousand Pop-Ups: How Marketers are Killing Their Brands

You are in a hurry, behind schedule and late for an appointment or work, trying to find something on the Internet that you saw headlined or mentioned on TV. You Google, go to the Web site, locate the item or story, start reading and POW! -- a pop-up jumps into view. You try to ditch it and the whole page goes down, forcing you to start over or abandon ship.

Or, once you are reading, more pop-ups appear, urging you to click on for a survey, or win a trip to Tahiti, or fill out a "Join List" box so you can see what you are trying to get at.

How can marketers think this is a good thing? How can even the lordly New York Times allow popup ads to dominate their editorial content and cause readers to flee, cursing and muttering about pages that jump around like frijoles saltarines, destroy attention before it's even established and make you want to get off the grid and forswear participating in the consumer society ever again?

True, media such as newspapers still don’t know what hit them when the digital juggernaut rolled into town, but do they have to act like a bunch of rubes who just came to market with a load of chocolate-covered strawberries and alligator-hide cell phone cases they made themselves? "Hey, look at this. No! This way! Over here!" Even the broadcast networks, who should know better, do it with stories linked here on this Web site.

I mean, how can savvy marketers believe that the rules of consumer behavior are suspended when it comes to Internet advertising? Don’t they realize that, as the stat beavers at Solve Media have calculated, you are more likely to complete a Navy Seal training program or climb Mount Everest or get into Harvard or survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad?

How can marketers embrace an advertising format that slows down Web sites, interferes with consumer information gathering such a map boxes or business contact information, and annoys the hell out of prospective purchasers, subscribers or users? Hasn’t anyone done internal studies of the effects of pop-ups on readership, click-through, and adoption?

I’ll tell you how: advertising has become strictly a numbers game, and Internet/social media advertising is cheap. I mean really, really cheap. But that doesn’t make it effective, and it’s even less effective when it takes the form of annoying and obtrusive pop-up ads.

As ad-agency chief David Droga observed to New York Magazine recently, "We’re one of the only industries where people have invented technology to prevent our work from getting to them."

Pop-up ads are the digital equivalent of Robo-calls from telemarketers, and we need a better way to block them without loading down our computers with dodgy software. Or, as venture capitalist Peter Thiel famously put it about technology: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

We wanted better and wider access to media content, and what we got were pop-up ads.

Finally, pop-up proliferation is a matter for chief communication officers to address, because, according to Jon Iwata and the Page Society’s ongoing research project, the future CCO is a "guardian of enterprise reputation." What is going on today affects brands, and brands affect reputation.

If pop-ups are annoying your customers and prospects to the point of distraction, then Duh! -- they are affecting your company’s reputation. And if you have the stroke to counsel the CEO then you certainly have the stroke to do something about this issue.

Don't you?

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