People are most annoyed by irrelevant advertising and the use of gadgets in public

    The research company YouGov conducted a sociological survey among residents of the United States and the United Kingdom, whose goal was to identify the top list of the most annoying users of things related to technology and the Internet. The survey included 5029 respondents over 18 years old, of whom 2,201 were British and 2,822 Americans (6 more were from other countries).



    The survey is curious in that it revealed something that opponents of aggressive online marketing and advertising have long suspected. So, 63% of respondents called the most annoying things “endless telephone conversations in a public place” and “irrelevant pursuing online advertising, which appeared because of a single click on the link”.

    According to the survey, almost all modern manifestations of using gadgets in public places are massively annoying to people. Interviewees noted that in addition to advertising they were annoyed by photographing food (41%), “sitting” in gadgets during joint meals and the corresponding struggle for human attention (53%), endless requests to evaluate an application or service (53%), a smartphone-zombie, who do not notice anything around them (55%) and, of course, listening to music / watching videos in public places without headphones (59%). Some respondents noted irritability of “venomous” on social networks, endless photos from other people's vacations in the tape and images of the “ideal life” on Instagram (from 23 to 38%).

    All this is curious at least in that it shows the real numbers of non-acceptance of modern methods and techniques for capturing the user's attention and dislike the policies of many social networks and software developers. For example, the survey clearly shows that people massively deny the postulate about the publicity of life for the sake of generating content and attracting attention, are more attentive to their time and show a desire to clearly separate their online and offline life.

    But the most annoying is irrelevant banner advertising, which chases users after any careless click or search query. Modern advertising algorithms on the main sites are based on scanning emails and analyzing search queries. Most often, the user is faced with the fact that he cannot hide his search history from the “home”, as it is “garlands” hanging on his IP address, or he has to watch advertising for the goods he has already found in the search engine and successfully bought . In general, the survey results more than clearly show the logical popularity of various ad blockers.

    The situation is aggravated by the fact that instead of mastering new native advertising formats, such giants as, for example, Facebook, are on the path of manipulating statistics. This is done in order to convince advertisers, due to which the company lives, that the banner is still effective. A few weeks ago, digital agency Crowd Siren sued Facebook for inflating ad viewing metrics. This is not the first lawsuit by the company to the social network. In 2016, Crowd Siren accused Facebook of overestimate of metrics by 60-80%. The social network has admitted its guilt and reported on the rectification of the situation. This time we are talking about overstatement of statistics by 2.5-10 times.

    Zuckerberg's company claims that the overstatement of statistics was “unintentional” and appeared due to an error. But even with this fact in mind, the social network is accused of the fact that after finding an error, the Facebook management did everything to divert the attention of the public. If the social network developers immediately corrected the situation, then all advertisers would see a sharp drop in the effectiveness of their campaigns, which would be expected to lead to a collapse in the value of the social network (the rising cost of the social network directly depends on the satisfaction and activity of advertisers).

    These news, together with the survey results, show that the previously successful contextual advertising model based on search queries and analysis of the contents of the email-box is dying out and the giants are looking for new ways of monetization. It is possible that the problem of irrelevant targeted advertising could be solved by obtaining more user data, but governments around the world are already working to prevent espionage of their citizens. The most prominent example of such a confrontation is the notorious European directive GDPR , which strictly regulates the processing of personal data of Europeans.

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