Sunday, April 17, 2011

Pop Ups and Internet Ads: Effective Political Tools?

As I was searching for something to post about this week, a pop up ad came up, as seen here:
I clicked on the "Vote Here Now" to see where it would take me (although usually I wouldn't do this pop ups for fear of viruses attacking my precious macbook), and this is the link it goes to: http://www.newsmax.com/surveys/Repeal-Obamacare/Repeal-Obama/id/4/kw/America/?promo_code=B995-1


This is a survey that asks several questions regarding a person's opinion on the new health care plan, other Obama bills, and the person's voting preferences. 2 Questions on this survey seem slanted in a way 


that makes Obama's plan look bad and could skew results to have people to oppose it. So obviously asking the question in a slanted way makes it a biased survey. Furthermore, people are only getting to this page if they are intrigued by the pop up ad, which generally means they are opposed to Obamacare, and want to have their voice heard.

Aside from that, the pop-up ad phenomenon is another form of "new media" that we didn't really discuss. It is interesting to me in particular since my father works for a branch of Google that deals with internet ads (this was originally DoubleClick, but it was bought by Google). In general, when an ad pops up on my computer screen, I close it as fast as I can. I hate the accumulation of windows on my computers and especially pop ups that I don't care about. Maybe that is why this ad is so striking: usually pop ups are about some vacation or some website that has no relevance to me, but this one was different. I wonder how much pop ups, and other ads on the sides of internet pages, can really affect someone's opinion.

1 comment:

  1. Companies have whole departments dedicated to marketing and PR so it must have some efficacy. However even they can still only speculate as to the true effect pop-ups really have. Funny that you should mention this because I see this ad all the time and happened to click on it once. I have to agree with you, it does seem a bit slanted.

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