An article today in the New York Times reveals the sordid details behind one of the most reviled campaigns on the internet: LowerMyBills.com's completely senseless use of puppies, snakes, dancing silhouettes, and skateboarders to sell mortgages.
Besides having no narrative, which offends me more than it should, these ads are badly programmed in Flash, and tend to freeze up my browser. It got to the point about two years ago that I had to install an ad blocker so that I could use the web at all. I'm not alone, either. The NYT even points to a fanatical blog dedicated to hating the ads.
Friends who hold me responsible for everything bad in advertising have used these ads (along with spam) as examples of advertising gone too far. But as much as I want to agree, I can't. You can only partially blame the people making the ads. The ugly truth is this: if nobody clicked on these ads, nobody would run them.
You can be sure that everytime you've deleted an ad for a male dysfunction drug that some rube has acted on that same e-mail and bought some potion. For spammers, the costs of lawyers, server fees, and bulk e-mail lists are still less than the profits from the schmucks who end up responding to spam. That one sale to some poor desperate guy makes all the other people deleting e-mails irrelevant.
If you don't believe me, read what the woman who actually created the LowerMyBills.com ads had to say about effectiveness:
Ms. Uhll said her online advertisements for financial companies, including ones she created before and after she worked for LowerMyBills, typically earned around $4 in lender referral fees for each dollar spent on the ad. The average for most lead-generation companies is less than $2 earned for each dollar spent on Web ads.
Four dollars for every one dollar spent! That's more effective than many of the campaigns that win IPA Effectiveness awards. This is made all the more depressing by Ms. Uhll's creative process, which as you might have guessed, doesn't involve account planning:
Ms. Uhll combined the two concepts, animating her silhouetted, pony-tailed woman with a swaying modern dance. Ms. Uhll said she is a dancer and took a variety of dancing classes for more than a decade. She is also a fan of the pet sequences in “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which relates to the animal ads.
“I usually put into my creative work what I love and what makes me happy and gets my attention,” she said.
Is it really this simple?
