::scr Marketing, Spam, Whatever

[Simon Batistoni]

On 26/10/01 06:00 -0700, celia romaniuk wrote:
> 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 said what I was going to say in response to this later on. But
may I just add that my mind still boggles as to who would actually
sign up for a service, or pay for something they'd been tricked into
visiting, though.

> 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. 

Hmm. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I was
watching TV and reading a book at the same time. And I think what
those of us who claim to be able to do several tasks at once really
do is the same as a lot of older multi-tasking OSes. Basically, we
keep 'rotating' the tasks in our mind, allotting a little time to
each one, so that our attention is only actually on one task at one
time. I even noticed that I was "buffering" the sound from the TV
whilst I read a sentence, and only really processing the words
afterwards.

But this is voluntary, and I think the reason we won't "multi-task"
within a web page in order to read the banners is because we get no
benefit from doing so, and they're not part of the information which
we currently want to access. Maybe.

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

There. I was going to say that about the evil hotmail banner. It
works wonders if ads are directly useful, too. To return to the
example of the property site I used to work on, some of the HSBC
mortgage ads we ran got 8% clickthrough rates on certain pages,
which is phenomenal by most standards, because they *added* to the
user's experience. "I'm looking for a house - done that - ooh.
Mortgages..."

> 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.

I think there's also an element of raising brand awareness (aagh!
marketroid-speak!) If you're playing a subtly-branded football game,
there's a reasonable chance that you'll remember the site/brand that
was attached to it, even if you don't overly notice it whilst
playing, simply because it's part of the experience of playing. Hmm,
my cod-psychology warning light is flashing now, but /shurg/. This
has got to be more effective than cramming stuff down the public's
throats.

-- 
Simon Batistoni            Penseroso Ltd
simon@penseroso.com     +44 20 7242 0570