Why Users Hate Online Ads and Advertisers Love Them

July 7th, 2006

There has always been a disconnected symbiotic relationship between the advertiser and the consumer. The advertisers spend money on ad campaigns until they hit that invisible, but very solid, wall of the consumer. When the consumer’s had enough, they stop paying attention. Then more money is spent on taking the attention-grabbing to a higher level. The consumers notice and then, due to disinterest or annoyance, stop paying attention and the whole thing starts all over again. Oh, no! Oh, yes! – my School House Rock moment.

And thanks to our old friend, the Internet, this process is growing exponentially. You can see it in the expanding advertising budgets as well as the expanding consumer hatred towards the online ads those budgets pay for.

My case in point. On July 5th, the iMedia article “What Users Hate About Online Ads” discusses the online advertising users despise and why. Not a day later, on July 6th, the eMarketer article “US Internet Ad Spend to Climb by 25%…Or Is That 33%?” charts how Internet advertising spending will jump a conservative 25% to 33% in the next year, compared to the total US media spending of 2.8%. And that doesn’t even include paid search, which jumped a whopping 84% from the same time last year.

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment. At the exact same time on-line advertising spending is dramatically increasing, users are increasingly more annoyed with that advertising and smarter in how they avoid them. Ah, the fond memories of childhood. I remember sneaking the dogs my broccoli at dinner after telling my mom over and over and over and over that I didn’t like those little freaky green trees of goodness. She didn’t listen, so I became smarter (and the dogs became sicker).

According to Cia Romano, CEO of Interface Guru, users equate on-line advertising to “rude behavior”. She sites some examples how users will also follow up their negative feelings with action, including going to the ad’s competition for the same product/service or immediately scrolling past the top banner on every single page they visit.

Jakob Nielsen, resident usability expert, also confirms these types of behavior. While attending his eye-tracking seminar during the NN/g Usability Week in San Francisco a few weeks ago, Jakob presented heat maps and individuals user tests that showed over and over again how adept people were at avoiding on-line ads. It was amazing how their eye movement moved in a “Z” pattern from header to content to footer and expertly bypassed any advertising.

So why is there such a disconnection? Will advertising budgets keep growing in line with the sophistication of the consumers’ avoidance? Are advertisers and consumers in an eternal love-hate relationship? Or am I just reading way too much into this?

What are your thoughts?

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