Column By the way: Attention at any price?

Sometimes you want nothing more than a quick overview: What happened? What's new? What do you need to know? This is exactly why many people visit news portals. Not out of boredom, but out of a need for orientation.

One thing is clear - digital content does not finance itself. Advertising therefore remains legitimate, necessary and part of the media business model. But there is a line between legitimate visibility and forced attention. In digital marketing, seconds are often viewed in technical terms: Viewability, view duration, completion rate and dwell time. However, people do not experience time technically, but emotionally.

Forced attention becomes noticeable when advertisements appear in front of the content for a few seconds and can only be closed after five or eight seconds. In other words, it takes a few seconds to close the advertisement with the «small cross (close button)». Now you might think that a few seconds is not very long. But it is long enough to trigger something: the feeling of not being invited, but delayed. Another annoyance - the close button is always placed in different places and is often very, very small. This increases the annoyance.

Contact becomes interruption

Why is this so annoying, especially on news platforms? Anyone looking for news is in a different situation to someone looking for entertainment. It's about topicality, classification, speed, relevance and reliability.

If people have to wait until they are allowed to continue reading, the effect changes. Contact becomes interruption. Presence becomes resistance. Attention becomes reactance. The question of what such a «dark pattern» cross triggers in the user is actually easy to answer: resentment, anger and the feeling of being forced and not being taken seriously.

In addition, blocking advertising never works in isolation. It also affects the environment in which it appears - in this case the news portal. Anyone who is repeatedly or even regularly disturbed on this portal will at some point ask themselves the question: Do I even want to be here anymore?

The consequence: people often leave such platform providers not because of one big mistake, but because of many small impositions.

Good advertising should not be blocking in order to be effective. It can be relevant instead of intrusive, cleverly placed instead of forced, attention-grabbing instead of obstructive, appropriate instead of disruptive.

Conclusion: The digital world likes to measure how long something has been viewed. People remember how their time was spent. And these advertisers either don't seem to know this or deliberately ignore it. This may work in the short term - but such behavior will not pay off in the medium or even long term.

By the way ... respect doesn't just show itself on a large scale. Sometimes it starts at five seconds.

Laura Colledani and Klaus Ammon have more than 40 years of combined experience in consumer research and marketing research. Over the years, they have developed a keen sense of what moves people - even beyond the numbers. Both authors advocate a communication culture that listens before it broadcasts. With the new approach of consumer listening management tools, they want to support marketing managers in not only questioning consumers in the traditional way, but also entering into a genuine relationship with them.