::scr Marketing, Spam, Whatever

[celia romaniuk]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Simon Batistoni wrote:

> that's okay, because being tech-savvy and web-experienced means we
> have a fair amount of experience in spotting a marketing link as
> opposed to general information, and we tend to filter accordingly.

I think this is true, to the extent that we forget what some people don't
know about using the web.

I've had my mum staying at my place for a few weeks. She's not completely
clueless when it comes to computers. She can pretty much manage, but her
knowledge is patchy. For example, she knows that you can tab between form
fields in web pages. But one day I came home when she was using Hotmail to
write some email. She said, "there was this thing at the top of the screen
that said there was a new message from James. I don't know anyone called
James." I explained that it was an advert. But without someone to explain
it, she probably would've clicked through.

To me, that sort of advertising is pretty evil. They know you're on a
webmail site; they know that some of the people using it are going to be
newbies. So advertising a messaging service there, in the form that
mimicks a message service, has a pretty high chance of deceiving a newbie
to click through.
 
> You don't notice the Google side boxes because you're concentrating on
> the results. You don't notice banner ads because you're concentrating
> on the page content.

There's this thing they talk about in Cognitive Psychology called 'locus
of attention'; its relation to HCI is discussed at length in a wonderful
book by Jef Raskin called 'The Human Interface'. The basic idea is that
people can only hold one particular task at a time in their conscious
attention. He uses terms like cognitive conscious and cognitive
unconscious to explain this - we background certain things but really do
tend to 'tunnel' on one only. 

I can imagine a bunch of people on this list saying 'bollox' to that, but
he argues the point very well, and I can only encourage you to go and read
it. I'd, er, try and repeat the argument here, but my copy went wandering
and I have the memory of a goldfish.

I should probably get another one. Book, that is.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201379376/

Aaaanyway, my point is that Simon's right - you really only concentrate on
one thing at once.

If the advertising is closely related to the user's task (or appears to be
related) it could well achieve higher clickthrough rates. 

> But marketing games are very successful, because the marketing is
> *fun*, and it's the reason you're at the page to start with. You don't
> notice you're being marketed to, and therefore don't put up walls
> against it.

Or even this - that you're concentrating on playing the game, and it's
fun. And you don't really care who made it or why. If the game's about,
say, football, and you're playing it cause you like football, and the
links at the end are to football sites, then you might click on
them. Whether it's advertising or not becomes less imporant.

Celia
(hoping that made sense)