::scr Marketing, Spam, Whatever

[matt jones]

At 14:27 26/10/01 +0100, Simon Batistoni wrote:
>On 26/10/01 06:00 -0700, celia romaniuk wrote:
>> 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.

Ah, you see it's a mindset thing, I reckon. For a total clueless newbie
(and I feel qualified to say this, being the nearest this list seems to
have to one), cause and effect as regards the computer do not exist. The
mindset is that this expensive machine requires some kind of genius to
operate and is very easily broken. Quite often they don't understand what
they are doing (even in terms of the abstract concept[0]), and that lack
of understanding makes it harder for them to learn.

The upshot of this is that when things go wrong with their computer
experience, their first port of call is to blame themselves[1][2]. So,
when they click through the evil banner ad, I'd suggest that they don't
even realise they've been tricked - they just assume they've done
something wrong.

I'd say that people's lack of confidence is more of a barrier to people's
development in this area than any lack of clue. Personally speaking,
learning got a lot easier and faster when I decided not to be scared and
just Experiment.

>> 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.

Heh, sounds like the BOFH's Management Stack Overflow to me:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/22378.html

>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.

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I stopped noticing them because
they were *never* relevant. Fact of the matter is that *people don't like
ads*, despite a plethora of "funny ad" compilation programs designed to
make us take more notice of commercials (Jo Brand! I always thought you
were a crap unfunny radfem comedienne, but now you're a crap unfunny
*sellout* radfem comedienne). 

>> 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.

Hmm, actually, I could have replaced my last paragraph with "me too!", I
guess. But that's why I think moguls have the wrong wend of the stick in
trying to target ads based on poeple's interests. Sure, I use computers a
lot, and I'm trying to drag myself up the foonix learning curve, but that
doesn't mean I want to see banners for a load of Uswer Friendly
merchandise, thankyou. Yes, Opera, I'm looking at *you*.

You guys are right - effective advertising is keyed into what people are
*doing*, not what they *are*. Maybe we should cc this thread to UKNM. :)

Oh, and I'd just like to say: *fucking* lag.

-- 
mjx
and tomorrow brings another train / another young brave steals away
but you're the one I remember / from the valleys of green and grey

[0] Case in point: someone who actually lifts the input device when you
tell them to move the mouse up.
[1] A trait that is reinforced when they go for help to geeks who tsk and
tut and suck breath in through their teeth and make them feel stupid[3]
[2] Although admittedly it usually *is* their fault
[3] Perhaps that's not a discussion suitable for ::scr