Doomed

By Crispin Sartwell

Perhaps you recall what we now understand to be the early days of television advertising. "Studies" tended to show that the more irritating and repetitive the spot, the better the "brand recognition."

The result was that television became practically unwatchable. Wisk around the collar beat ring around the collar, every frigging time. Companies played their ad twice, back to back. Car salesmen, in a crescendo of doltishness, aspired only to cause us greater suffering than their competitors.

It is with deep sadness that I report that the internet has arrived at the same phase of development. With happy fanfare, the internet ad industry just released three studies suggesting that larger and more intrusive ads sell more stuff.

Particularly effective, it seems, are "interstitials" that interpose themselves between you and the website you're trying to see. And ads are "better" if they make noise or include lots of gratuitous motion.

This news is greeted happily by the industry that produced it, because it seems to show them how to spend your money and your time effectively. It's good news too, perhaps, for internet publishers. Many of them are losing money or going bust because they can't sell advertising. And they can't sell advertising because the advertising has been ineffective.

The interstitial, like so much else on the net, was courageously pioneered by the "adult entertainment" industry. If you start visiting pornography sites (I'm told), pornographic images start popping up in a kind of staccato, which (I'm told) can cause a bit of embarrassment about the home or the office.

For the same reason, you want to avoid all gambling sites, because once you visit, you will never again be able to duck the interstitials. And if you respond at all to opportunities to place a wager, you will go broke at an extreme pace. Go back to your bar, your bookie.

Meanwhile, of course, the thing you wanted to see - your e-mail, your book order, your newspaper, your search, your blueprint for a small, easily concealable nuclear device - has disappeared into a kind of welter or fog of interstitials. You're trying desperately to close them before they open, and if you have a slow modem, you're in a position where the internet has become something close to useless.

Immediate closing is the key. But it is also the challenge for an industry that seems bent on destroying not only the internet and thus itself, but your personal mind. Already, there are interstitials in which the close button is concealed, or which, when closed, simply pop up again in mutant form.

Perhaps these ads are the most effective of all. Perhaps ads that you simply cannot avoid, that attack your sensibilities and make your day a little harder, are good ads, when measured in brand recognition. On the other hand, maybe people will start ditching whole big segments of the internet, or even avoiding their computers.

In announcing the appalling results, Barry Salzman, the president of the ad company DoubleClick, Inc., said that "the most important point here is that every brand measure the traditional marketers care about can be enhanced when a user is exposed to just a single exposure of an online ad unit."

Cutting to the chase, this represents the literally stunning traditional insight that you will recognize brand names if you've seen them in ads. And of course you will recognize brand names that you simply cannot avoid, no matter how desperately you try. Such is the insufferable, inevitable confluence of their greed and our stupidity that is annihilating the net today.

I would abandon the internet except for one slim hope of redemption. The internet advertising industry is still young. Wisk seems no longer to scream "ring around the collar" on my television. Manufacturerers of television remotes at some point began to understand the beauty of the word "mute." Television advertising has to some extent wised up, matured, and become more subtle, funnier, and better looking.

It may be that people will develop muting software to destroy interstitials. And it may be that DoubleClick will wise up.

They had better, or we are doomed. Doomed.

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