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Frank Kemp was working on his computer when his cellphone let out the sound of Mario — from Super Mario Bros. — collecting a coin. That signaled he had a new voice mail message, yet his phone had never rung.
"At first, I thought I was crazy," said Mr. Kemp, a video editor in Dover, Del. "When I checked my voice mail, it made me really angry. It was literally a telemarketing voice mail to try to sell telemarketing systems."
Mr. Kemp had just experienced a technology gaining traction called ringless voice mail, the latest attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses. The calls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a voice mail box — to the surprise and (presumably) irritation of the recipient, who cannot do anything to block them.
Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.
But consumer advocates, technology experts, people who have been inundated with these calls and the lawyers representing them say such an exemption would open the floodgates. Consumers' voice mail boxes would be clogged with automated messages, they say, making it challenging to unearth important calls, whether they are from an elderly mother's nursing home or a child's school.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday June 05 2017, @05:01PM (3 children)
Well that's sort of half-right. Advertising of the sort he's talking about is dying. You are sort of correct that advertising in the broader sense is alive and well. Cord-cutting, on-demand, and DVR are killing off traditional TV commercials. Advertisers are responding by pumping up how much of the hour is devoted to paid spots. That, of course, accelerates cord-cutting more.
Meanwhile, product placements are growing in popularity because they're not interruptive. The DVR doesn't help you skip those. Netflix lets you binge all you want without commercial breaks, but the commercials are part of the show; on one end of the spectrum you have a show like Good Luck Chuck that was a never-ending ad for Best Buy, and on the other the show Eureka that would have the main characters gush about their new Subarus.
Then you have search-ads. You've already indicated you're interested in something by searching for it, so it's far less annoying that interrupting a sports broadcast to market maxi pads. The conversion rate is far superior, too. That's why Amazon has been eating Walmart's lunch the last 5 years.
Out-of-home (billboards, subway ads, etc) is in trouble, too, because Millenials don't drive, and when they're walking around taking public transportation their noses are in their phones the whole time.
In short it's most accurate to say advertising is radically transforming. But now that technology has reached saturation in the public it will not take long for advertising counter-measures to proliferate if advertisers choose to make themselves as interruptive and hateful as they have been in the past.
It's a more or less positive development, because when you want something is when you're open to suggestions, but when you don't interrupting you with irrelevant crap is stealing your life away in small quanta at a time. I could imagine scenarios where doing the latter could become criminalized.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday June 05 2017, @05:07PM
In an ideal world, purchases are demand-driven rather than supply-driven. In other words, you buy things because you need or want them. TV ads and the like are almost all about supply-driven purchases: "We have gazillions of widgets, and want to sell them to you!" regardless of whether you need or even want a widget. I mean, compare the number of car commercials to the number of people genuinely looking to buy a new car, and you'll see how ridiculously out of whack it is.
And you are right that search ads are far less annoying than TV and print ads are. At least the ad is for something there's a good chance you're looking for.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday June 05 2017, @09:42PM (1 child)
Just a minor correction, but Chuck was an ongoing advertisement for Buy More the fictional store he was in. To me, that could've been an Office Depot as easily as a BestBuy, as it could perhaps a Fry's. It was fairly generic to me.
That being said, the whole show was long advertisement for Subway sandwiches. I have to admit, while I hate advertising in almost all of its forms, I was amused by how hard they tried. The Subway sandwich itself could've asked for membership in the Screen Actors Guild.
There was even an episode, almost erotic, where the manager professes his love for the Subway sandwich. I'll admit it, I had feels in the scene, and was able to relate to that man's love for a meatball sub :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:32PM
That's true. I had forgotten that. Burn Notice was the same for yogurt.
If they're gonna do something like that, work it into the story and characters organically at the very least. Everything shy of that is groan-worthy.
Washington DC delenda est.