Forced Advertising Tools - Norms

Internet or World Wide Web is growing geometrically and now it appears difficult to imagine a world without inter connectivity. World has become a Global Village and within seconds one can communicate with the rest of the world. Advertisers are advertising their products and services via SMS and email marketing. More and more IT professionals are making application software to extract data from the web as we extract Honey from Honey Bee Hive. Here the extracted honey is in the form of extracting email addresses, mobile numbers of the individuals and their area of interest based on their web browsing history. The World Wide Web is woven by millions of internet users in such a way that even the super spiders or webmasters are ignorant about the alogarithm created by the super computers.

Unsolicited Calls, SMS and emails irritate the Mobile or Account users. Before the problem grows into an epidemic we need to invent new means to counter these marketing strategies. I have seen the CEO of a big company receiving SMS, emails from the competitors. I, myself, used to receive so many calls about financial products when my self have 35 years experience in dealing with financial products. Is it not irritating?

SMS Marketing:In India one can block all such commercial communications by sending SMS “START 0” to 1909. To start receiving commercial communication relating to Health Products, one can send SMS “START 4” to 1909. One can choose any preference out of the seven categories below:

Banking/Insurance/Financial Products/Credit Cards-1, Real Estate-2,

Education-3,Health-4,Consumer goods and automobiles-5,

Communication/Broadcasting/Entertainment/IT-6, Tourism-7,

If you receive the UCC, unsolicited commercial communication, even after 7 days of blocking the category, complaint can be lodged with the service provided by sending SMS “COMP TEL NO.XXXXXXXXXX; dd/mm/yy; hh:mm; short description of Unsolicited Commercial Communication” to 1909.

Individual have to waste their precious time is blocking, registering complaints about UCC. Rules and Regulations are required to penalize for such unsolicited commercial communications so as to discourage the unauthorized use of data extracted from the web through unauthorized crawlers by unscrupulous search engines.

Email Marketing and Spam emails:

Though Gmail provided by the Google Network appears to be the safest with in built warning systems, 2-step security and specific application related password but even then the Inbox and Spam Mail boxes are full of unwanted emails. One has to unsubscribe from the mailing list and even after opting for unsubscribing, mails continue pouring in whenever there is updating of web servers. Such mails never originate from the Government Owned Undertakings, Institutions and Departments. Such unscrupulous or unsolicited mails originate from the servers of Profit Organizations or fraudulent entities. Can’t the Governments all over the world exercise control over these activities in the similar way as the Governments exercise control over their defense installations and their various local/state/central level e-governance.

Conclusion and Futuristic Approach:

I am not advocating against advertising but we need to devise ways and means to block spam, advertising mails so that the individual’s precious time is not wasted in scanning such mails. It will be better if Google or other Email providers can provide separate boxes prompting the user to mark the mails as: 1) Possible compromise to online security 2) Advertisements 3) Subscriptions 4) Objectionable Content – containing sex, violence and hate 5) Caution Mails seeking personal details in addition to existing spam folder. Over a period of time such mails will get isolated when marked by the intelligent internet users. In the time to come when my vision will be a reality and world will be transparent having fully switched to online electronic media, there will be less CAUTIONS !

Now in the four walls of the sweet home, kids as young as 9 months old watch the LCD and HD screens with eager eyes and impact of the video on the undeveloped minds make the kids believe that whatever they watch on the screen is true. By the time the kids grow up, become major from minor, it becomes difficult to get rid of the impressions on their minds during their tender ages. Psychologists, the world over, owe a responsibility to study such impressions and the ways and means to wash off and counter the embedded impressions on tender minds. The day is not far away when separate Television Programs with "No Advertisement" will have to be pressed in service to protect the tender minds to be invaded by the advertisers as Child Locks and Family Safe concepts have been introduced on the internet. All the displaying LCD and HD screens of the future may have built in third eye to estimate the age groups of the audiences and based on the observations of such third eye, the display of the advertisements may disappear and appear again if the specified lower age groups leave the audiences.

While reading this article you might be seeing online ads being pushed by the advertisers trough adword campaigns which serve the ads to the visitors according their interests and text based searches. For example if you click on the ad being shown to you on the top, right or bottom then the advertiser can track you trough your IP address email or website. You may receive an email that only recently you visited our site but did not complete your order. The advertiser might also send you coupon code offering good discount as the advertiser saved the cost of advertising commission to be paid to the ad serving agency, had the order been placed through the ad clicked by you online. Three persons are involved in the advertisement being shown on the top, right or bottom of this page. Adserving agency which get the major share, the publisher who gets a part of the income earned from the ad and the advertiser which pays the cost of advertising. All these ad servings appearing and tempting you to click and buy are forced by the automated systems based on your interests and your search results. Such forced advertisements can be stopped by you through your browser settings but it is not advisable as you may miss good opportunities to buy good products online at cheaper costs while sitting in the comfort of your bedroom and articles purchased being delivered at your doorstep on "cash on delivery" basis. Now it is your option to opt out of such forced ads or to enjoy reading the article even with ads displayed which can not be termed as nuisance as in case of mobile calls or mobile SMSes wasting your time unnecessarily.