In Text Advertising: Interruption Advertising vs. Permission Marketing

What makes those double underline links so promising as a method of advertising? It’s the crucial difference between interruption and permission. Although this concept still seems very fresh, the idea was presented by Seth Godin a decade ago in his marvelous book Permission Marketing, and if you still haven’t read it, it’s never too late. Traditional advertising is based on grabbing the attention of people away from what they’re doing – TV commercials, newspaper ads, telemarketing phone calls, and even online display banners. Godin calls this Interruption Marketing and shows how it’s much less efficient when people are getting continuously interrupted. In fact, he says it no longer works. Instead of annoying people, marketers should offer their potential customers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Godin calls this Permission Marketing and by now, ten years later, I think it is widely accepted as a fundamental basis to successful marketing strategies.

When adding more and more display ads on a website and making them larger, animated and jumpy – not to mention covering the entire content with full page ads – we’re only pushing the no-longer-working traditional interruption advertising. Excessive rich media ads work poorly for the advertiser, and since they annoy the website’s visitors, they are eventually bad for the website publisher as well.

For a short while, in-text ads were also considered interruptive. The double underline links appear within the text and are very difficult to avoid, so at first, we deemed them intrusive. But this was a mistake. A double underline link is a subtle hint to a reader telling him that if he’s interested, there’s paid-for content concerning the highlighted term. That’s it. Very delicate, without consuming any of the reader’s time or fighting with the actual text over the reader’s attention. Compared to an animated banner, or to any other form of advertising, it’s the least intrusive form of advertising. And then, only if the reader actively shows interest in the advertising content and takes action in form of an intent hover with the mouse, a bubble appears with an advertisement inside it. Again, the ad only shows up after the reader signaled that he’s interested in learning more about a product or a service. This is permission advertising at its best, and it gets even better.

After the bubble appears, the reader views the advertising content and makes a choice – make the bubble disappear by moving the mouse away and continue reading, or click on the ad and follow it to the advertiser’s landing page. This choice is the second time permission is granted for advertising – turns out that in-text ads are in fact a form of double-permission marketing, with only minimal interruption.

For the advertiser, who pays only for actual clicks, the visitors are all users who actively chose to get exposed to the advertising content. They were seeking further information and they gave their permission – twice! – to spend time with the advertiser, which is best possible start for such a relationship. When advertising works well for the advertiser, the website publisher is also happy, because the advertiser is willing to pay accordingly. In addition, the publisher has managed to limit the interruption to his visitors and therefore improve the chances for them coming back.

As long as the hint for the advertising is clear and the ad only shows up for the interested reader, in-text advertising leans heavily towards the right side of the fight between interruption advertising and permission marketing. It could be very tempting to modify in-text ads to formats that mislead potential readers into clicking without understanding that they are about to be exposed to ads. For the short term, this can increase click rates. But on the longer term, it will move the ads to the other side of this delicate balance, towards interruption, not permission. There are much better ways. To increase clicks, conversions and revenues, the algorithm needs to be improved and the integration should be optimized… there’s a lot to it. I intend sharing my experience with you, if you just give me your kind permission.