For a long time pop-up ads were found on porn sites but hardly anywhere else. That was for a reason: the format's potential to annoy web users. 
    These days, pop-ups are popping up all around the web and on such well-known sites as Salon.com, CNN.com and Real.com. 
    Working against the pop-up is its intrusiveness. Bang, it seems to blow up in the user's face from nowhere, a new screen apart from the site one is visiting. The user has to click the window closed to get rid of the ad.
   What's working in the format's favor--and what explains its growing popularity among new media people--is its effectiveness.
     Media buyers claim that the format delivers a click-through rate of anywhere from 2.5 percent to 19 percent.
   That's many times the click-through rate of the banner ad, which hovers around a negligible 0.3 percent.
     “Pop-up ads seem to have higher click-through rates and higher interaction rates,” says Harry Gold, director of interactive media at Mullen, a full-service agency in  Wenham, Mass.
    “They definitely have more brand impact, as they cannot be ignored.”
     The pop-up ad is a blanket category that encompasses any size of square or rectangular message that pops up in a window independent from the browser, unsolicited by the consumer.
     Pop-ups are also referred to as “interstitials.” In addition, there are brand-name technologies for pop-up ads, including the Unicast “Superstitial.”
     As with banners, costs can vary widely.
     CPMs--the cost for a thousand ad impressions--can be as low as $10 or as high as $200, but a more common range is $30 to $60. 
   Pop-ups tend to cost more to place than banner ads— roughly 10 to 20 percent more — but this varies widely from site to site and by size of the run.
     Whether pop-ups deliver that much greater value depends on who you are talking to.
      “I wouldn’t say it’s overly expensive. I’ve had banner campaigns come in higher than pop-up campaigns,” says Thomas Hespos, who heads the interactive media department at Mezzina Brown & Partners in New York.
      “The only reason I think they may be priced differently from banners is that people think they can command a premium for them,” says Gene Kincaid, a partner at email-forwarding service Austintexas.com and a lecturer in the advertising department at the University of Texas.
      In truth, pop-ups are not necessarily more expensive to produce. “It’s just a matter of what goes in that creative slot,” Kincaid says.
      The fact that this “creative slot” can hold a whole lot more than a traditional banner is another thing buyers appreciate about the pop-up.
      “You just have so much more space to work with,” says Mullen’s Gold. “You’re not limited to a particular size generally, and you can build a lot of functionality into them.”
      Another pop-up benefit: Web surfers don’t have to leave the web site they are visiting. Like other formats that use rich media, the pop-up can function as a mini-site. As such, it can help establish a brand while offering transactional services and opt-in or contact opportunities.
      “If your goal is to have them join something or to buy a single item, a pop-up may be the way to go. If it’s an impulse item and the transaction can happen in the pop-up, then why not?” says Gold.
      But you can’t talk about pop-ups without running into the fact that many users despise them. Some critics of the format say that if there were a true equivalent to pop-up ads on TV, it would come along and change the channel you were watching.
     “There is a relatively small but vocal minority of users who have a low tolerance for pop-ups,” says Salon marketing director Patrick Hurley.
      And that’s one reason that Salon recently announced that it would introduce an ad-free version of its content for which users will pay $30 a year. Salon.com began running pop-ups in the third quarter of 2000.
     As much as they like pop-ups, media buyers and planners acknowledge the format’s flaws.
    “It does get noticed, but it has as much potential to annoy as it does to start a legitimate dialogue with somebody,” says Hespos.
    “The pop-up ad is analogous to the phone calls I receive during dinner,” says Jamie Korsen, president of KSL Media in New York. “You have to be careful with these types of executions because you don’t want your creative messaging to leave that call-during-dinner sour tone in your potential best customers.”
     Also, pop-ups tend to physically blot out the content that the consumer is actually seeking.
    Media people point to three ways to sidestep the annoyance factor.
    First, target pop-ups as carefully as possible, because pop-ups don’t work for every type of web surfer.
    “If we wanted to reach C-suite executives—CEO, CFO, CIO—that is a very bad format, very in-your-face,” says Korsen.
     Another group of users who hate pop-ups are tech-savvy web veterans, notes Brad Aronson, the president of i-Frontier of Philadelphia.
     “But the vast majority of the people who are accessing the internet through AOL are accustomed to that type of advertising,” he adds. “For them, I think they look at it as similar to a TV commercial. It’s just part of the price for the content.”
       Second, avoid repeated pop-ups in the same visit. With Unicast, for example, there is a frequency cap of one or two per user session.
      Third, be sure the pop-up is either very informative or very entertaining, since either of these attributes will help the ad seem less annoying.
      According to Hairong Li, a professor in Michigan State University’s advertising department, consumers see especially diverting or helpful ads as being less intrusive.
      “The verdict: You have to target people when you place interstitials, and you must maximize contextual interest so you can neutralize the perceived intrusiveness, which in turn will increase the effectiveness of the pop-up,” Li says.
      Regardless of the pop-up’s usefulness, no one should rely on them exclusively, says KSL’s Korsen.
      “Any online media campaign should have a healthy mix, a variety of different sizes and types of messages,” Korsen says.
      “I think they are overused and therefore they are burning out faster than other less intrusive things,” says Austintexas.com’s Kincaid. “However, with the right creative used on the right site at the right time, they can be very effective.”

April 4, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life

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