Why do we have annoying and irritating internet, and TV advertising, commercials/ advertisements?

It is a peculiar thing in advertising that sometimes the most annoying of all types of promotion can sometimes be the most effective. We are all familiar with those ads on television that just scream at us to switch them off. They are just so excruciating that you can’t bear to watch them. Afterwards you ask, why did a company make such a downright irritating ad? What possible benefit can accrue to them from actively irritating their potential customers? Then the answer comes to you. You can remember the product precisely because the ad was so horrible. The old dictum that "No publicity is bad publicity" has just operated in front of your eyes. The ad that you hated so much has given, the company that sponsored it, that most valuable of all benefits to be derived from advertising; brand recognition. You might cringe when you think of the advertisement. But you will remember the name of the product. Job done for the advertiser. One particular ad I know that is especially annoying is for an insurance company. They employ two well known, but annoying comedians, to voiceover an animated telephone and a computer mouse. Their antics, and the dialogue, are more than especially banal. There is another where the characters go round with large light bulbs on their heads to denote that they have just got a good idea. Both of those ads have me reaching for the remote, to switch off, when they appear on my television. But I always know that one of them is for an insurance company, and the other is for a finance provider. It's strange but I can remember these ads, and the products that they promote, but I cannot recall the product names mentioned in the more tasteful and slickly produced examples that I see as well.

This method of promoting a product may work quite well for television advertising. It will not be so effective for internet advertising. When we are watching television we are usually relaxing. It is either after work, or we are on a break. Our time is not being wasted by watching the ads. But when we are at our computers it is a different matter. We are then in the middle of doing something. Often we are busy trying to promote our own business. We have a lot less tolerance for annoying advertising than if we were just watching our favourite show. There are many forms of annoying advertising online. One that gets me more irritated than most is the ads you get that try to forestall you clicking away. They usually give you a message about a special price reduction, if you press cancel instead of ok. Sometimes they have a picture of an attractive girl with headphones, who is only dying to tell you about the brilliant discounts available. Some of these ads have such clever software that you only need to put your mouse over the X to prompt the appeal. There are one or two really annoying ads that will not allow you to use your back button to escape their clutches. You have to shut down your browser to get rid of them. None of these methods will work on me. They serve only to annoy. They frequently just cause me to shout at my computer, "Go away you stupid fool. I would not have clicked on the X if I did not want to go". My neighbours must sometimes think I am mad. Another ineffective form of advertising is frequently come across if you surf traffic exchanges. Here you get credits for viewing other people's ads for around eight seconds. The more ads you view, the more views you get for your own ads, and you usually want to click away as soon as the minimum required time is up. But some companies post ads on top of the ones you are viewing that say they have a twenty or thirty second countdown. They don’t offer you any credits for viewing them. Are you going to waste valuable time reading them? I think not. You could have viewed several credit giving ads in that time. That company should not have wasted its money buying such an ineffective advertisement. Another wrong way of advertising is to post really long ads with videos to watch, and loads of smiling customers offering you their opinions on how brilliant the product is. Why can’t people try to keep it simple? I just want the essential info. Overselling will not work on me. I suspect that it doesn’t work on anyone else either. Popups are another annoying feature of internet promoting. Some companies even have popups that appear and then obscure part of their original ad. What is the point of that? The final and most annoying type of promotion I will mention is the companies that want you to fill out a form, with all your details, before they even tell you how much the product will cost. A well-known social network tries that trick on their advertisers. That is just downright unethical. I avoid them for that reason alone.

That concludes my little rant for today on the pitfalls of dealing with some forms of internet advertising. I hope I have not put you off entirely. There are some very effective ways of promoting yourself, or your products out there. Whichever you use I wish you the very best of success, and a great increase in your prosperity.