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from the if-they-had-only-listened-before dept.
Marketoonist ran a story about marketers saying, "Oops, our bad."
The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers:
"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience....
"We build advertising technology to optimize publishers' yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty...
"The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond."
Nod to pipedot for running this story.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday October 26 2015, @05:07PM
That comment wasn't aimed at you. The "challenging us to do better" was a comment to their shareholders or VC or sugar daddies, who apparently do not mind funding such evil. I guess cola executives don't mind seeing their ads full screen if they paid for it. Maybe it gives them a subtle high to see how their product is on the internet!
I mean... as a totally random example, one that I also used among family and friends and asked if they actually did this: who really goes to coca cola's website? for what purpose? (none of the people I asked ever went there, but assumed the site existed and probably had coke related flash games or video ads of attractive people drinking coke in fun settings. No reason to go there, so no one did).
I can't even imagine what the point could be for Coke's website besides preventing someone from redirecting it to a website like Pepsi (perhaps it exists to prevent a redirect to Royal Crown and so on--its cola all the way down) suggesting you can lose weight via dieting and not drinking empty calories. Because that would be wrong, just like filling a site with misleading medical details that avoids the elephant in the room -- if your room stinks of elephant shit, and you have a trunk, big ears, and make a lot of unnecessary noise in autoplaying advertisements, you're the elephant so stop shitting in the room. Rooms like that I don't go to, like coca cola's website, because you can smell that stink without going into the room. Don't cry to me that you reek of elephant shit. Even circus elephants are trained, and ones in the wild know better than to roll in their mess. So why don't these big companies? Oh wait, they are using their marketing to try to change the narrative that sugary soft drinks is bad. They've evolved into something worse!
You have to be pretty evil or pretty stupid to believe any of that (but a good and intelligent person if you believe me, right??)
I can only imagine that they cut off their noses in spite of their faces and also plugged up their face to prevent from smelling anything shitty. But that's pretty unrealistic so I think marketing executives are engaging in a mental dissonance in that they want to believe they are providing value because if everyone refused their services they would have to get a new job. They likely really believe they are doing the right thing as a positive for everyone, if only they would listen to the message! Why do they hate Corporate America, because as people, us Corporate Americans have feelings too!
Anyone remember the show Newhart? Where Bob Newhart retired and opened a bed and breakfast hotel (he had a show in the 70s, also called Newhart...), and had regular people hanging out there or working there. The waitress/maid Steph (cynical/sarcastic big haired 80s blonde on the show acting as a foil of sorts to stupid visitors) was married to a marketing executive who truly had NO SKILLS and couldn't even pick his nails if he was in danger of getting dirt under them. (It must have been a plot device that she was married to him, or, he was rich being a marketing executive) He got fired after people at work started poking around to see what he actually did, and it only amounted to his attending meetings and agreeing with upper management and expensing trips to places and stadiums and stuff. He did nothing, he didn't even make the ads let alone watch them. He truly had no idea how any of it worked or even what the products they sold did. He wasn't looking at ads, that is what the little people did! When cornered he couldn't even think of something of value he did but he had been doing his job his entire life, and he didn't even know what it was when his job depended on it.
He was fired. Soon, at the unemployment office, a homeless man that typed at 20wpm with a high error rate was accepted for a position he applied for because that person had more professional skills. Truly a low in his illustrious career of marketing--he couldn't even market himself.
I think that the show depicted the typical marketing executive pretty well -- at least, as far as I have come to see them. Maybe they do something, but it isn't obvious what it is or what makes it valuable to me as a consumer or end user.
So, when they are trying harder, they aren't trying harder for our favor. They are trying harder to keep from having to learn how to type.