Don't Be Evil

Remember when Google told the world that one of their company mottos was, "Don't be evil?" Reading about the latest spyware/adware developments, I have been thinking that it's a credo that marketers would do well to take to heart.

The FTC has filed a suit against Sanford Wallace, a guy who's made a career out of enabling intrusive marketing that consumers hate. He was a king of spam; now he's a king of spyware and adware. In defending what he does (which wreaks havoc on PC users), he says, "we believe what we're doing is legal."

"Legal" is not a standard for best marketing practices. As a marketer your job is build the long-term market for your service or product (or that of your client), not to get away with everything you can without being sued or sent to jail.

It's reminscent of the rise and fall of pop-ups. The first pop-up ad appears, and of course they outperformed banner ads because they were new and different. Soon your desktop became a jungle of pop-ups as everyone used them. They became annoying; they stopped working well; and before long, pop up blocking software appeared.

Too many marketers reacted to this the wrong way. Consumers blocking your pop up ads? Well, the answer was to find a way to defeat that software!

The sheer stupidity of this approach, which views your potential customer as an enemy to defeated, is staggering. And of course, it wasn't viable either; today pop up blocking is a feature of most browsers.

One of the interesting aspects of discussions of spyware and adware is the distinction between the two. Some marketers express concern than legal efforts to battle spyware will interfere with legitimate marketing technology. This isn't unreasonable, but sometimes I wonder if too many marketers have lost sight of what they are supposed to be doing.

There's a lot of confusion among consumers about what all of this technology does. At the benign end of the spectrum, we have cookies that let us distinguish one site visitor from another. And by knowing what a given visitor has been doing, we can serve up relevant ads to them. While this is troubling to some consumers, it's largely accepted - as long as the information about web browsing is not merged with real-world identifying information. In other words, it's okay if I visit a site and see ads for cars because I've also been looking at car buyer information sites. Or ads for businesses in Houston because I've been looking at the Houston Chronicle web site.

But it's something else altogether when I am seeing ads because that are being served to me because of purchases I made with my credit card, or because of what's on my credit report, or because I'm in a database of homeowners.

The parameters for this sort of tracking have been in play for some time. What's new is intrusive software that actually affects the functioning of your computer. A combination of the inherent flaws of the Windows OS (which allow things to be done to PCs that should never happen without an administrator logging in and authorizing changes) and evil genius marketers eager to exploit those flaws has led to a situation where criminally unscupulous people can hijack a PC for there own ends. I was reminded of this just this week when I heard from my retired parents, who discovered that a bit of spyware had gotten onto their PC and started dialing the UK through a small long distance carrier to the tune of $10 per minute.

That obviously is a scam. But what about a bit of marketing code that changes your home page? What about web sites you can't escape from without shutting down your PC?

To drop down another level, what about what happened the last (last as in both most recent, and the last time I will ever do this) installed AOL's free chat client on a Windows PC? I discovered that my home page had been changed and my desktop and start menu were littered with icons for AOL software and free trials of their online service. If I have to use a Windows machine now, I use a third-party client such as Trillian, because I don't appreciate AOL meddling with the settings of my computer.

There's a very simple criterion for marketers. Anything that changes the functioning or settings of the user's computer is a bad idea, and should be avoided. Whether it's setting a new home page or just adding icons without asking first, it's a bad idea. The consumer is not some passive target for your messages and your meddling. The consumer is an individual that uses their PC according to their own needs and desires, and if you meddle with that, you are risking alienating that consumer.

There are offline analogues to this, of course. When TiVo first appeared, television advertised worried that people wouldn't watch commercials. They were right to worry, but their reaction - "we have to find a way to make them watch commercials" - was completely wrong. The message there was that consumers don't like commercials, and that they needed to find another way to reach them. (In truth, consumers like creative, interesting commercials, but there's not way to tell whether you're going to see one of those or another mattress salesman yelling at you, so most consumers will just hit the fast forward button on the TiVo or DVR and skip the whole experience. Another tragedy of the commons, where the worst ads kill the audience for the interesting ones.)

So my message to fellow marketers is this: Don't be evil. Don't mess with the consumer's PC. Don't try to force them to do anything they don't want to. There's an army of software developers ready to offer them free or cheap technology to avoid you. Work within the limitations your customer sets, and your customers will reward you.

When I heard marketers complaining that regulation of truly evil spyware will affect them, I am unmoved. If you are relying on these kinds of technology to do your job, you're effectively trying to hold a gun to the consumer's head and make them watch your ads. Yes, it can work, but not for long. As with so many other situations in life, once you find yourself in court, it doesn't matter if you're right - you've already lost.

Does that make your job harder? You bet it does. That's why you get paid the big bucks. Start thinking about how to reach people in ways that they will accept - or better yet, welcome. Because forcing people to see your advertising when they don't want to is ultimately a losing game.