Here’s a video pitching a new service from Solve Media. See below for my thoughts.
I’m totally with them through the first minute of the video, during which they say something like, “this is everything that’s wrong with advertising, and while we’re at it, this is everything that’s wrong with web authentication interfaces.”
Great!
But then our philosophies diverge for the next 0:40 seconds. Instead of “and this is how to fix it,” they opted to go, “and this is how to smush the two problems together and take advantage of it!”
I don’t like to call a company out on a thing I disagree with, but the first minute of the video proves they’re not clueless – they get what’s wrong with interruptive ads. But their solution seems to be to force people to engage with the interruptions, instead of ditching the interruptions altogether.
I don’t know enough about the product itself to deliver a final verdict, but this ad turns me off. It claims, “the future of online advertising will require this kind of cognitive approach.” Um, cognitive approach? I’m pretty confident “cognitive approach” translates to “employing psychological tricks”.
Come on – our cabal of internet marketing conspirators at least attempts to maintain the illusion we’re not brainwashing the masses. Stop spilling the beans!
Solve Media seems to have an innovative product, and I applaud their efforts to make the web suck less, but I fear they missed the forest for the trees.
(Regarding the problems of “captcha” nightmares; all captchas do is outsource the work to your customers that your web team should be doing validating users, thereby depressing form completion (and ultimately, sales). In most cases, captchas are for people who care more about their time than their customers’ time.)