Sometimes you have to wonder what advertising gurus use for brains. For decades now, we've watched them fail to grasp the simple truth that television commercials repeated ad nauseam can actually drive viewers to boycott products rather than buy them. In recent years, though, it has been the idea of popup Internet advertisements -- a device so exquisitely devised to annoy that it makes you wonder who their inventors actually work for -- that has shown the true extent of advertisers' mental shortcomings.
You only have to use the Internet a few times to figure out the problem: Popup ads are fundamentally out of sync with the Internet's biggest drawing card, which is control, or at least the illusion of control. We want information, and we want it fast. Anything that even attempts to interfere with that, such as a box ad designed to come out of nowhere and sit on top of the very text we're trying to read, will enrage rather than seduce us. It's a device that makes those grouped television ads look positively polite. (To reproduce the popup effect on TV, you would have to have ads appearing from nowhere in the middle of a movie or news program and blocking the picture until you either read it or zapped it with the remote. Besides, commercial breaks have their uses, as ad-free programs longer than an hour always remind us.)
Further undermining the Web surfer's sense of control over his or her own screen is the way the ads work, triggering new browser windows whenever a surfer visits a given Web site. As a result, in a typical Web-surfing session the screen fills with stacked rectangles so quickly it ends up resembling a game of online solitaire. We have yet to meet a user who admits to reading these ads. On the contrary, the world seems to be divided between people who whack them whenever they appear and those who simply let them rotate to the back of the stack and ignore them. In a survey conducted last year by U.S.-based Statistical Research Inc., respondents said they were 50 percent more likely to notice a popup ad than a sedate banner ad (such as those on The Japan Times' online site) but 100 percent more likely to find them intrusive.