An IMA client who actively utilizes our email expertise gave us a call after we sent out an email blast to his subscribers. “What in the world is this double green underline under the word ‘Benefits?’ in the email message?” he asked. “When I roll over it, a strange game pops up.”
We were stumped. We went back and opened the message in our own email. No double green underline, no link from the word ‘Benefits,’ which looked like every other word.
“What email client are you using?” we asked.
Turns out it is Outlook Express, which is a Microsoft, browser-based, free product. That fact made us turn to Bing to look up the word ‘Benefit,’ and sure enough, in the Merriam Webster dictionary definition, there were double-green underlines under the word, which led to a Vibrant Media-generated ad.
Clearly, Microsoft had decided to monetize its free service by allowing certain words to be flagged in its Outlook Express emails. Now, almost the same thing that happens in a Google-based gmail account – ads appear on the right-hand side that are based on the subject of the email themselves. But somehow, that never seemed to intrude on the private nature of the actual email. The fact that in the Microsoft model underlines appear in the body of the email and that moving your mouse over them pops up a definition or an ad – somehow makes this way of presenting the ads much more intrusive. And definitely feels like an invasion of privacy.
If I can chance a baseball analogy here, it’s as if the billboards along the side of the field ended up in the middle of the action. Just when an outfielder catches the ball, an enormous sign flies out of his mitt, and we’re all forced to read an ad for Happy Endings Ice Cream, or something else equally ludicrous.
For the client, worse followed the next day, when we had occasion to send out a message that a member of the subscriber base had passed away. Ads originated from the words funeral, cemetery, and cremation. Microsoft had moved out of the realm of the merely annoying to something truly disrespectful.
Now, our email may not be the private matter we think it is, but we don’t need that fact rubbed in our faces. Microsoft, take a lesson from Google. You will lose your free Outlook Express users if this is what they have to put up with. For an ad to be successful, you have to allow your users to ignore it when they need to – stay out of the body of our email messages!
