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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: 1) by tftp on Monday October 26 2015, @10:23PM
A dead-tree computer magazine I like has both ads on the text pages, and a separate ads-only section. I've never bought anything from the ads on text pages. But I've explicitly gone to the ads-only pages to look for things.
As some on SN may be aware, I am one of those people who hate ads. However this does not apply to ads-only pages. I receive QST, for example (one of the two dead-tree magazines that I subscribe to,) and it has ad pages. Quite often I like to look through those, to learn what's new is up there. The keyest difference here is that those ads are not interfering with me reading an entirely unrelated article. They are read in a completely different configuration of mind, on my own terms, when I am curious about new products.
In other words, ads on demand are fine. They are useful, as they allow manufacturers to explain what they have. There is time and place for everything. There is time for silence during a brain surgery, and there is time for loud music during a large, wild party. Just don't mix them up. If I want to see ads about bicycle headlights, I want to search for them and be given a collection like Google Images. I don't want to see ads about bicycle headlights when I read an article about glueballs, or about serialization of a class.