"Pop ups are here to stay" was "a VERY unethical practice?"

From: Jonas Hollander <jonash_at_lemonbox.com>
Date: Tue 10 Sep 2002 21:41:47 -0500

Vlad, Geri, Steve, Jim, Steve who bothered to comment and all you "lurkers"
out there,

I picked this one up from one of Mediaposts newsletters today, the headline
was "Pop ups are here to stay":

"Safa Rashtchy, Senior Research Analyst Internet Media and Marketing for US
bancorp Piper Jaffray, recently issued a report, and he too believes that
'pop-ups are here to stay,' as stated in his newsletter, Silk Road Weekly."

Here's why:
"+ Pop-ups are highly effective. We know that they get higher click-through
rates. Their conversion rates are high also. Yes, some people hate them,
but not so much that it affects the traffic on the sites serving them.

+ Major advertisers like Orbitz, Dell, Providian, Morgan Stanley and
Columbia House are among the top ten users. This shows a trend. It won't be
long before other major advertisers use pop-ups too.

+ Sites banning pop-ups are in a minority and have good reason to ban them
(e.g., Google and iVillage who do not want to interrupt the user
experience). This is not likely to spread to the majors, according to
Rashtchy. And he makes a good point. After all, aren't the highly
effective rich media takeover ads that have zoomed across sites like Yahoo!,
The New York Times and CBS MarketWatch also pop-ups, albeit much more
creative than the X-10 camera ads (which we cannot forget, still worked like
crazy)."

In addition i'd like to add my own list of elements required to succeed with
pop ups (in no particular order):

- Frequency control
- Be relevant (contextually relevant that is)
- Don't crash users browsers
- Don't change the browsers behaviour (such as modifying close buttons etc)
- Be clear about the sender (people should know where it came from and
where to complain)
- Use pop ups instead of the more sneaky cousin, the pop under.
- Allow people opt out (if you don't have that function at least allow
people to block you out, no point in upsetting people who are easily upset).

Besides those points it's all down to plain old brilliant creative, being
innovative, good offer, right targeting the right people etc.

Best regards
/Jonas - so flame me :-)


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Received on Tue Sep 10 2002 - 21:41:47 CDT