When pop-up ads takeover

While completing my post for this week’s discussion “Ethical Ads?” surprisingly I came across some unethical ads while I was reading an article discussing the unethical ad that I was researching…so I thought to use this blog post to continue the conversation.

As you may have read, I submitted a distasteful ad from the “Got Milk?” campaign that discussed how milk can help women with their PMS symptoms, by poking fun at boyfriends who can never seen to “get it right” while their women are suffering from the symptoms of their menstrual cycles. After seeing the ad, I clicked through on a section of text that focused on areas where the campaign had received backlash, which brought me to an article on Salon.com.

When I first entered the site an ad about the new “Snowden” movie popped up. I found this normal because a lot of sites have ad pop-ups when you first enter. However, after no more than 7 additional seconds on the site while reading the article, the “Snowden” pop-up came on my screen again, and took over the webpage until you made it through 5 seconds of the ad, when you were allowed to click out. Ok, now I was started to get a little annoyed. I scrolled down once on the article to keep reading and then scrolled down a second time, and again, the image popped up. At this point, I think I am justified to be annoyed with the ad. Being on a site for roughly 20 seconds and having the same pop-up appear multiple times is just annoying marketing.

Luckily, the article was short so I was able to escape the site, but I almost wish I had stayed on a bit longer to run a test to see just how often that pop-up appears. I’m curious to hear from you all about some of your pop-up ad horror stories. Or any sites that are big abusers of pop-up ads, so we can all save some sanity and avoid them.

Before reading the article, “ Online advertising ethics. Questionable uses of online advertising,” (Spirizzi, 2016) I’m not sure I would have classified, or thought to have classified, pop-up advertisements as unethical. But when you encounter a website that turns the user experience into a stressful and unpleasant experience, I think you run the risk of crossing that fine line of what is ethical.

References:
Spirizzi, M. (2016 Jan. 19). Online advertising ethics. Questionable uses of online advertising.The Balance. http://advertising.about.com/od/onlineadvertising/a/guestethicalads.htm

Williams, M.E. (20 July 2011). “Milk’s sexist new PMS-campaign.” Salon. Retrieved on 14 Sept. 2016 from, http://www.salon.com/2011/07/12/milk_sexist_pms_campaign/