Shoe company tricks people into swiping Instagram ad with fake strand of hair
medium.com
medium.com
In my early PPC days I had to learn that lesson in real time. Creating interest in clicking an ad does not equal campaign success. Maybe this company was doing this for buzz/PR. Maybe they needed to learn the same lessons I did. Maybe they are simply playing the numbers game.
It's ridiculous.
Some of us just don't want to click or _see_ ads but somehow marketing departments seem to think that "if we can get 2 seconds of you, you will be buying everything we sell"..
The marketing department in my company was flabbergasted when I told them I actively avoid products I see in ads, although I am not that exposed anymore.. Mostly public billboards and the like.
Get off the internet and stop leeching content. If you're not paying for it, you get to see ads.
Having said that, I run a PiHole and uMatrix. I'll stop when;
- Tracking behaviour improves. I don't need to be fingerprinted across domains. Track me through your own site by all means, but no further.
- 3rd party networks become responsible for the content they serve. If your network serves up malware or a cryptocurrency generator script, you get penalised heavily or just dropped entirely.
- General behaviour improves. This hair-swiping trick, pop-unders, auto-playing videos, in-text mouseovers, active-content popups demanding email addresses, tiny X's that are impossible to click without activating the ad content... No. That stops.
- Forbes. Making your entire site rely on scripts from third parties to require enabling a slew of random site's JS is not the answer. Making your ads less obnoxious is.
Bottom line is, I would much rather pay than view the damn ads and be tracked.
I could probably tolerate a few ads on a page if they didn't break your commandments above, but we all know it won't happen, especially the 1st and 3rd ones.
Ad-blocking isn't "leeching" content. Users have always had the ability and the right to filter web responses, it's not like television where the broadcast is one signal and the viewer has to take it or leave it, that's not how the web was ever intended to work. If sites send content along with advertising, then they have to accept that their advertising can be filtered out at will, and their content read for free.
No, that would be crazy.
I think similar tricks have been played before.
Yeah it's been done before.
It's funny, every few years people discover something... that has been done before.
So the company might not have realized how foreign the concept is outside China.
They are gonna be soooo disappointed!
You might be able to do even better when it comes to tinder. You could change the color, length and texture of the hair based on your personal preference. People with hair similar to the hair in the picture are probably more likely to fall for it, since most hair that falls on your screen is your own.
*My numbers may be off.