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I recently received an email from Chris Fralic at First Round Capital that prompted me to share some thoughts I have had on the topic of opt-in user controlled ads. Chris mentioned that he has “always been struck by how little attention is given to offering users choice in ads.” I couldn’t agree more.

A review of reported response rates for various kinds of ads show that opt-in postal mailed catalogs, and opt-in email lists perform dramatically better than junk mail and spam (1000-10,000X higher response rates!). This information isn’t exactly a secret, so it seems rather surprising that there has not been more interest in opt-in web ads to boost response rates over today’s existing bulk and targeted non-search page web ads.

Not more ads — but more personally relevant ads

This lack of prior interest is even more surprising when you consider that user controlled opt-in web ads, like XooXooX, don’t increase the number of ads you see, they just increase the relevancy of the ads you already see. That’s an even better proposition for the user than they get with opt-in postal mail or opt-in email where you get these “in addition” to all the junk mail and spam you have always received. Moreover, the effort in evaluating opt-in web ads is much less — there are no cluttered inboxes (physical or email) or messages that require a click or envelope to scan and a click or toss in the wastebasket to delete. You can see Web ads out of your peripheral vision and notice them or ignore them without a click.

What about people who hate all ads?

For our earliest trials we wanted to have some very technical people (who self-identify as “geeks” and “hackers”) testing our software to make sure it was robust and secure under a variety of different browsers and hardware platforms, even though these testers were not typical of our ultimate target audience. Still, there was no point in testing the software with people who are less tolerant of technical problems until there we could be sure that they wouldn’t face such problems. So until we were sure that any serious technical problems had been identified and resolved we limited our trials to members of our own geek squad.

Our first testers spend most of their days online, reading a lot of blogs and other content pages that currently contain web ads in the margins. As a result, they are probably exposed to many more web ads than the average web user. And they tell us the ads in the margins are almost always irrelevant and frequently annoying.

Turning a blind eye to ads

And while our testers tend to do a lot of online purchasing at retailers like Amazon and eBay, they all reported that they had developed a kind of cognitive blinders that allowed them to view the pages they read without even noticing the ads. So, while they agreed that they would do some deliberate Quality Assurance testing of our product, they assured us that they were not really appropriate targets for the production service since whenever they were not doing deliberate testing they would once again ignore the ads, because they just don’t buy based on any web ads.

The Power of Curiousity

Based on this self-reported disinterest in web ads, we didn’t expect them to purchase anything. But a strange thing happened. We actually generated several unexpected purchases during the test, even though completing purchases was not a part of this phase of the quality assurance testing. And even more surprising, a majority of our early testers wrote us that they wanted to continue using XooXooX after the initial test was over, each saying how their blinders had changed.

One tester told me:

“I didn’t think that I would actually notice the XooXooX ads when I wasn’t doing the tests. I pretty much just don’t even see web ads normally. But, because I select the products XooXooX was searching for, I find myself constantly noticing ads that have the identifying XooXooX heart logo in the upper left corner. I check the XooXooX ads out, because I’m curious. XooXooX ads are like a grab bag package I am being given — I am always wondering “what did I get?” It is kind of like when I go onto Amazon.com and there is a new recommendation for me. I get curious what it is. And it is not like either of these require any real effort to satisfy my curiosity. I don’t have to click on anything or bring up another window. I just notice it out of the corner of my eye without any effort. And here’s the strangest part. I’m noticing only the XooXooX ads. I am still blind to the other ads on the pages I see. It is just that now it is a selective blindness.”

Some readers might be tempted to consider this report of changes in selective blindness to be more wishful thinking (and a form of “please the experimenter” bias) than a real scientific result. And to be sure we haven’t done scientific trials to verify such claims. But before readers throw out this anecdotal report entirely, they might want to consider the scientific results reported in a research paper “Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain” by Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze and John-Dylan Haynes that appeared this past April in the journal Nature Neuroscience. A nice summary for lay audiences, titled “Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them” was written by Brandon Keim and appeared online in Wired on April 13, 2008. It may be that our unconscious minds will decide which ads we notice, without our being aware of this filtering.