Clutter: The Tangled Web
They’re everywhere!
PROMO fired up the Web browser for three hours of surfing one day, and blearily pushed away from the computer having encountered a whopping 272 promotional messages. That’s a strong sign that marketing dollars are still flowing online — and that you’re smoking something funny if you think it’s easy to make a brand stand out amidst an endless array of pop-up windows, banner ads, discount offers, e-mail newsletters, and sweepstakes.
Visited on this Clutter Patrol tour were a variety of Web sites including some of the more popular destinations (both generally and promotionally) such as aol.com, delta.com, nba.com, nabiscoworld.com, ibm.com, weather.com. ebay.com, visa.com, pepsiworld.com, nintendo.com, toyota.com, travelocity.com, bluemountain.com, walmart.com, and usatoday.com.
We also stopped by the majority of the 50 most-visited sites — including yahoo.com, amazon.com, nbc.com, cnet.com, att.com, monster.com, and mypoints.com — listed on the Media Metrix hot list. (Note: We spent two hours online one weekday morning, then surfed another hour that night.)
We found 139 banner ads (but didn’t have the time to wait and count how many advertisers rotated through each), 34 of which touted some type of promotion like a sweepstakes or discount. Most banners were relevant to the site on which they were placed or to the search we performed, although the inevitable porn pitch or “Lose 30 pounds this week” ad did surface on occasion. Eleven pop-up windows jumped out to promote special offers, club memberships, or games.
Sweepstakes, games, and contests were abundant, and we came across 61 of them — and that’s without having hit any of the many sweeps-specific operations out there. Most were stand-alone efforts housed on sites, although some were executed via banner ads driving viewers to another home page.
The most notable endeavors included a United Airlines effort at united.com dangling a chance to be a pilot for a day, a campaign on LifeSavers’ candystand.com delivering a golf game with professionals, a promo on msn.com giving the winner hanging time with Willie Nelson on his tour bus, and hourly giveaways of free travel awards on new airline portal orbitz.com. Games that caught our attention included a Brokerage Challenge on americanexpress.com and a trivia game on nbci.com.
Click Crazy
Elsewhere, we bumped into 13 offers for e-mail newsletters, three of which dangled sweepstakes to lure subscribers. We also found 21 sites featuring sponsored sections or content (“partners” included Visa and Ford Motor Co.), and 27 of which offered rewards for providing information (gap.com gave $10 off a $75 purchase for joining its mailing list).
Among the eight incentive programs we found were travelocity.com’s promise of a $100 MasterCard with the purchase of an American Airlines vacation package, msn.com’s trade of free movie rentals for subscriptions, and toyota.com’s cash-back pitch to college-graduate car buyers.
We found nine sampling opportunities, the most creative of which was Procter & Gamble’s offer of free Olay product for visitors to oxygen.com who send electronic greeting cards to friends or relatives. In addition to every airline site, we encountered loyalty/continuity programs in eight places, ranging from Frito-Lay’s ePloids to American Express’s Membership Rewards. Five sites heralded a cause tie-in (such as gap.com’s association with the Make A Wish Foundation). And we came across 11 offers for downloadable coupons.
Interestingly, we found many brands operating home page promotions (hersheys.com, pizzahut.com, nabiscoworld.com) but doing little elsewhere to drive traffic. For example, candystand.com features more than 15 games, contests, and sweeps, but we didn’t find one banner ad promoting the site anywhere else on our journey. Similarly, most brand-run promotions were site-specific: While many may have been publicized through other channels (packaging, P-O-P, TV, radio), they received little hype on the Web.
It should also be noted that we successfully clicked through to all promotional offers with only one exception (a “Create your own Pepsi can” link on nick.com). So the technology is working. In addition, all requests for information carried opt-in or opt-out buttons to prevent spamming, a positive sign that marketers are sensitive to privacy issues.
But with heavy activity like this, will consumers soon become desensitized to online promotions?
