• by Tig Tillinghast , October 18, 2002

Forget AOL and Earthlink for a moment. Sure, they’re making a big press deal about being anti-pop-up, but the real story is the fact that the Internet audience is having a violent reaction to these deliberate and annoying interruptions.

AOL and Earthlink (and Microsoft, and others recently putting anti-pop-up messages in their advertising) are merely responding to their focus groups that they hold semi-regularly at small consumer research facilities in obscure tertiary cities, like Jersey City and Orlando. The message Mom and Pop America have been sending them in the past year: “Pop-ups are annoying enough that they make us angry. We hate the brands that use them, and they make us want to switch ISPs.”

In what I consider a remarkable marketing event, Earthlink has geared the creative for an entire television ad campaign around the fact that it will provide software that can prevent most pop-ups. That is sort of like Ford spending its ad budget on the “feature” that its cars can be outfitted with a third party vendor-provided seat cushion.

The fact of the matter is that this pop-up tail is now wagging the dog of the Internet value proposition. I’ve worked on two different ISP clients in the past 10 years, writing the creative briefs for campaigns and conducting focus groups. In the list of possible value propositions were the expected features: speed, ease-of-use, etc., yet in the past few months all of these have been trumped by the scourge of pop-up Internet pollution.

It’s a more important marketing message to not have pop-ups than it is to have instant messaging, or simple interfaces, or any other feature that once topped the wish lists of people shopping for Internet service.

Hello, brands? Are you getting the message?

In a show of stupendous ignorance, many brand managers haven’t begun to figure out that these same market forces – the exponentially increasing revulsion of the Internet audience – affect the brands that exploit pop-ups.

Where in the ROI equation do you fit the “customer-is-beginning-to-hate-our-guts” variable? Most agencies and brands haven’t yet had the revelation that all this bad ju-ju is rubbing off on them. They aren’t factoring in this variable. It’s like the time my agency experimented with discount-oriented banners for a diamond client: great numbers, but great damage done to the brand impression. At least we were observant and honest enough to call the whole thing off.

There was a story on the Associated Press a few months ago about a man outside of Washington D.C. who found himself sleeping in the same hotel as a large telemarketer convention. He set his alarm for 3 a.m., waking up to call every single room in the hotel to tell everyone how much he enjoyed being interrupted at home by telemarketing. It brings a smile to the face, doesn’t it?

I have a fantasy of perpetrating the same sort of harassment to the X10 people and anyone else contemplating a pop-up campaign. No, I don’t think it would change anyone’s mind. Pop-ups are a force of the markets, and as such are inevitable. My fantasy is more a product of an immature need to get revenge. In this dream, I’d trick the people at Gator to sell me the media opportunities they have at all the rate card pages on the sites that sell pop-ups. I’d have 63 pop-ups appear as a serial ad, a la the old Berma Shave campaign. A frequency cap? Why yes, I’ll put a frequency cap on this campaign. Let’s set it at 9,143.

In today’s environment, instead of using pop-ups, Brand X would be better off hiring those scary windshield “cleaning” people at city intersections to have them hand out flyers. They knock on your driver’s-side window, demanding money for having sprayed some gooey liquid on your windshield. You feel extorted, maybe even threatened. They might scratch your car if you don’t give them some money. Oh, look, a flyer for Brand X. And somewhere, in an office tower nearby, a media planner – who cares about as much for brand integrity as she does for pocket lint – ticks off another impression.