Pop

Pop-up ads are the bane of the Internet. Everyone hates them with an undying passion. Many people go to great lengths to install software on their PCs that will block them, even at the extent of some inconvenience or lack of functionality.

So why, in the name of all that’s holy, are TV networks beginning to look at popup ads on TV shows?

Well, money, duh.

As an “NYPD Blue” rerun unspools on Court TV, the screen shrinks and shifts. Up from the bottom rises a message: This episode of the famed cop show is brought to you by Planters’ nuts, the salty Kraft Foods Inc. snack. As a movie plays on AOL Time Warner Inc. cable-counterpart TNT, a quiz runs across the bottom of the screen, asking viewers a question about the film. It’s sponsored by United Parcel Service Inc. Earlier this year, TNT tested a tactic that had a message from an American Express Co. financial-services operation appear — just as Steve Martin faced a particularly thorny money decision during “Father of the Bride II.”

Of course, this is all evolutionary, not revolutionary. Networks have been putting “ghosts” in the lower corner of the screen for years — first, unobtrusively, to identify the channel as it was searched past, more recently to tout new or upcoming shows they want you to watch. And end-titles on TV shows have been mangled and squeezed into reduced real estate for some time now, as “what’s up next” blurbs keep you from seeing any of the production details of what you just saw.

It’s just experiments, for now, and certainly, for the present, such ads will be relatively small, relatively unobtrusive … for so long as the viewer is highly sensitive to them.

Once it becomes the norm, though — i.e., when folks stop noticing them at that level — expect that the networks will start selling bigger, more obtrusive ads.

After all, the common wisdom goes, as long as you’re getting noticed, that’s the important thing, right?

(via Blogcritics)