Banner Blindness

Banner blindness was first coined by Benway and Lane of Rice University in a 1998 study on website usability. The study looked at external ad banners and internal navigational ad banners; and found that users skipped over the ads when scrolling through a page and that the traditional method of making large, flashy ads did little to impact interaction by a web user. I should also note that there were only six participants in this study and it was done 17 years ago. If marketers are aware of such an impact, why are so few ads being seen by humans? You'd think that we would have engineered a way for ads to seem more relevant than the web content on a page.

I responded to a Twitter survey earlier today and one of the questions asked if I had seen a tweet or ad about Batman v. Superman, and I hadn't, even though I use Twitter on multiple devices. In fact, I really do have a hard time remembering advertising on Twitter, if it even happens at all.

And, it's not just me.

In a 2013 study about banner blindness, nearly 85% of consumers reported not remembering the last banner ad they saw; and those that did, a mere 2.8% thought they saw something relevant to them.

If I speculate about how the desktop-to-mobile experience is evolving, I'd say that banner blindness will significantly affect how Facebook's news feed works with consumers just skimming over content. Brands and advertisers don't just have to contend with the quirks of Facebook promoted content now they also have to worry about not reaching their intended targets.

Pre-populated Web Contact Forms

I don't know what's worse at the moment, being forced to register for each real estate website where I want to browse a listing or having fake contact data pre-populate when an online account is generated by an agency's contact management system. From time to time, I'll comp neighborhoods around where my rental is located to see if housing prices of the existing home supply (vs new housing starts) are rising, falling, or staying the same. The web contact form lead wall with Keller Williams is just one of those examples of a poorly thought out lead generation plan. I'm not sure why their web form thought I'm from NY, but it does. Unfortunately I have seen this type of web form behavior before where the back-end software captures and saves the contact info of the most recent transaction; in this case, a user from NY.

Here is an example of a pre-populated customer account that you probably don't want replicated with your own website:

Keller Williams: post-login from new account creation, user account profile

And, to make it worse, you actually do have to check your account profile to see what email items the opt-in signs you up for because while there was only one checkbox to opt-in for email marketing, there were three options from KW. See below:

Surely, much success can be attributed to this lead gen program in terms of quantity of lead generated and number of validated email addresses that are added to one's in-house or partner email list. But, I'm not sure what they really mean by a trusted mortgage partner. There's also no double opt-in upon signing up, like a confirmation of an email address for starters. That's bending the opt-in rules a bit. Banks, insurance, and credit card companies do it all the time because they have subsidiaries or divisions that do partner-like activities. Also, there's no mention about a privacy policy or data usage policy on a user's account profile, or how to find out more info about it.

It's unclear from the web page's source code if this is a home-grown web form or hosted by a third party provider. I'm not terribly inclined to check out other KW agency websites to test this out.