Computers and marketing

& No Computers and Marketing (Pop-up Ads) 30 January Introduction The Internet has grown so fast thatit now forms part of our daily lives. Social network and other sites are used by people to keep themselves updated; people today also get the news more often from on-line sources which had led to the decline of newspaper readerships. In the scheme of things now, it is very hard to imagine life without going on-line even for a single day. A rapid growth in mobile devices and other portable consumer electronics products has likewise contributed to the Internet becoming ubiquitous. We now do most of our daily tasks on-line too, such as shopping, transacting with a bank, planning the vacation trip, booking a hotel room, confirming an airline reservation or sending money. It is inevitable that with most people doing things on-line, marketing and advertising executive are now also going on-line. Internet traffic continues to surge with more people going for convenience, ease and security of transacting their business on-line. Advertisers naturally go where the people are. Discussion Advertising serves a dual purpose: commercial, as when promoting a new product or a new service, and secondly, as a public service (such as broadcasting weather reports). But the essence of advertising has always been primarily commercial in nature. Advertising industry executives always find creative ways to post their ad messages and this is almost everywhere: in newspapers, magazines, giant billboards, moving billboards (such truck-side advertising or even on the bodies of airplanes like the Irish budget airline Ryanair) or in broadcasting such as radio and television. The latest media are digital Web sites on Internet and digital mobile devices such as cellular phones. It seems there is no escaping these ubiquitous advertisements. Like most people of my generation, I spend a considerable time of my waking hours on the Internet. But what destroys my day is when pop-up ads kept popping up. These cause me to lose my focus or concentration on whatever I was doing at that time. These ads are very distracting, to say the least, and very annoying. Pop-up ads are a form of on-line advertising; I appreciate the creativity of those who made them. However, I consider the ads as an invasion of my privacy. Many of these pop-ups contain viruses (malicious adware), try to collect your e-mail address and other personal data, and worst of all, can cause your computer to crash. It can even be likened to the medical profession in which people (patients) need to give first an informed consent before doctors can proceed with a treatment protocol or a surgery. Internet advertisers who sent these pop-up ads (an inverse version are pop-under ads) are discourteous people who did not request prior permission from people who are on-line. Although I believe in the First Amendment rights, I consider these on-line ads as an abuse of those rights. This is why most Web browsers today incorporate a pop-up blocker (Parsons, Oja & Ruffolo, 2007, p. 241). Advertisers have no right to interrupt me with their ads while I am on-line. Conclusion There has to be a balance between freedom of speech (for those who advertise) and on the other side, the people who received those ads. There should be a law that prohibits such an immoral activity (invasion of privacy) like what the producers and publishers of pornography are subjected to by Federal laws. The United States constitution does not afford protection for obscenity and pornography; the same should also apply to pop-up ads because these violate a sacred right: privacy. If given a choice, I would advocate for some criminal liability to people who made and sent the pop-up ads to finally deter them from doing so. These “ in-your-face” distractions cost time and effort to close them; newer pop-ups even refuse to close, making all the ads more difficult to ignore and even aggravating to a large extent (Berger, 2005, p. 108). Reference List Berger, S. (2005). Sandy Berger’s Great Age Guide to the Internet. Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA: Que Publishing (Pearson Educational Group). Parsons, J. J., Oja, D. & Ruffolo, L. (2007). New Perspectives on Windows Vista. Boston, MA, USA: Cengage Learning.