Imagine a complete stranger walking up and demanding your name, phone number or other contact info. Whether it’s on the sidewalk or at a party, that degree of pushiness, especially by a complete stranger, would be totally unwelcome. And yet marketers do it all the time.

I’m talking about those pop-up windows that ask for your email address in exchange for some information that might be worth your time and might interest you. Then again, it might not. After all, they don’t know you, or anything about you — except that somehow you landed on their website. You probably know little or nothing about them too.

Entry “pop-up sign-ups” are the most annoying. These appear almost immediately after you land on a page – before you’ve had a chance to look around and see what the site is all about. Another appears every time you click anything. If you’re anything like me, you quickly tire of the nonsense and exit the site.

Supposedly, they’re a proven way to increase sign-ups. Maybe. But I wonder how many frustrated visitors (like me) enter a phony or never-checked email address just so they’ll be left alone. If that’s the case, the quantity of sign-ups may increase, but the quality suffers.

Question: Why don’t toilet paper and paper towel manufacturers put their brand/logo on the tube INSIDE the roll? As it is now, when the roll is empty, you can’t find out what brand it was. It’s frustrating if you want to be sure to buy (or NOT buy) that brand again.

photo credit: powerbooktrance

Hate those awful online ads ? You know the ones I mean. The ones that blink and spin and move around and morph into different shapes? Brace yourself. They’re about to get even worse.

“The Online Publishers Association has created a series of new standards for really big, intrusive, bash-you-on-the-head sorts of advertisements, which you are going to start seeing on its member sites in coming months.” NY Times

When will these advertising “experts” learn? The key to success in online advertising is relevance, not becoming noisier and more distracting. Look, most adults go online for a reason, and it ain’t to see ads. They’re looking for information. If your ad is relevant to the information they’re online to find, they might just take a look. But obnoxious, in-your-face ads? No way. They just fuel the demand for ad-blocking software.

Besides, haven’t these people heard? A little company called Google is doing pretty well with relevant, low-key, text-only ads…