What would happen if online viewers got a choice of what ad he or she was about to be shown? Although some sites have dabbled with this method, it is about to be rolled out on a wider basis: Microsoft, Yahoo! and Hulu are all planning to give users the chance to select which ads they'll watch. (via Business Week)
Such sites as CBS.com, AOL, Discovery.com and MSNBC.com will be using a new ad-selecting tool called ASq starting next month. According to Business Week, viewers get to choose from one of three online videos instead of having a pre-roll clip shown. The campaign could yield some interesting data in what consumers like about ads, and what makes certain videos go viral.
It might also fortify a growing school of research that shows targeted ads are the best of two evils, at least from the consumer perspective.
Most companies don't mind targeted ads if they are presented in a value-for-value trade-off such as free access to Internet content, according to a survey by PreferenceCentral. The research also found that attitudes and preferences significantly shift when consumers are educated about behavioral targeting or when they are offered ways to control their exposure to these ads.
These studies differed from previous ones, including last year's Annenberg-Berkley survey "Americans Reject Tailored Advertising". The reason for the difference, PreferenceCentral said, is that these surveys asked single-option questions. PreferenceCentral generated similar results as those reported in the Annenberg-Berkley study when it did so as well - by asking simple, single-option questions only a minority of respondents indicated that they wanted to receive tailored online ads.
However, while past researchers concluded that the reason behind consumers' negative response was privacy concerns, the PreferenceCentral study probed further and found that their primary reason was a dislike for annoying online ads, not privacy concerns.
What Makes an Ad Annoying
Indeed, the subject of annoying ads strikes a deep nerve among consumers. The Consumerist recently took online ad developers - and the brands that use their work - to task for their ever evolving ways to reach and engage with consumers. These included video ads that auto-play when you navigate to a page, super-headers that bump down all the content on the homepage so that you can't tell what site you're on, new rollover ads that are impossible to avoid with the mouse and ads that "just float above the page with the tantalizing "X" that is supposed to close the ad when clicked, but never seems to work."
By contrast, ads that work best have several things in common, Walter Guarino, a Professor of Advertising at Seton Hall University, says. "They are short in length (usually 10-20 seconds), they are relevant in some way to the type of audience visiting the site (so they don't come out of the blue) and they are not loud and jarring." The real problem, he tells MarketingVox, is that when someone does not expect to see a spot "forced" on them, it is hard to remove the initial negative thoughts.
