Your Opinions Are Very
Received a big envelope in the mail yesterday, and when I reached in and pulled out the contents, this is what I saw:
Science magazine has contracted a survey company to find out about the effectiveness of its advertisements. Granted that I am hardly in the position to buy a new PCR machine for the office, since I'm not a purchase agent and we never need PCR done, but I did have opinions on their ad strategy, which is to load the first few pages with naught but slick colorful ads.
This has trained me and doubtless thousands of other readers to thumb past them to the less colorful content pages, rendering the ads invisible, especially the pages that don't face anything but another ad. They even clue your fingers because the ads live on a different thickness paper! You don't even need to look at the pages at all; your fingertips will let you skate through, like a metacarpal tivo.
Moral conundrum: do I tell Science, which I adore, how we are cheating their advertisers?
The dollar is not payment, they assure me, but designed to get my attention. Worked.
Science magazine has contracted a survey company to find out about the effectiveness of its advertisements. Granted that I am hardly in the position to buy a new PCR machine for the office, since I'm not a purchase agent and we never need PCR done, but I did have opinions on their ad strategy, which is to load the first few pages with naught but slick colorful ads.
This has trained me and doubtless thousands of other readers to thumb past them to the less colorful content pages, rendering the ads invisible, especially the pages that don't face anything but another ad. They even clue your fingers because the ads live on a different thickness paper! You don't even need to look at the pages at all; your fingertips will let you skate through, like a metacarpal tivo.
Moral conundrum: do I tell Science, which I adore, how we are cheating their advertisers?
The dollar is not payment, they assure me, but designed to get my attention. Worked.