When Did Pop-Up Ads Get So Passive-Aggressive?

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If you don’t want to read a Cosmo listicle of the sexiest movies ever, fine, it’s your loss — all you have to do is admit that you like sleeping better than sex.

Why is Cosmo suddenly interested in shaming you for your lack of interest in sexy movies? Why does Women’s Health force you to declare, "No thanks, I already have a bikini body" if you dare resist its 21-day bikini body plan? It’s all part of a conversion strategy that web properties are using to increase clicks and all-important email sign-ups, and a slew of major publishers are in on it. On Elle, you might be asked to enter your email address to unlock the "32 Surprising Things That Are Destroying Your Skin," or opt out by clicking "No thanks, I’m not interested in protecting my skin." Also on Elle, if you don’t care about the 10 best mascaras, no problem; simply click, "No thanks, I don’t enjoy long, luscious, clump-free lashes." Food & Wine wants you to officially acknowledge that not getting its newsletter means you’ll be knowingly staying out of the loop — horrors! These messages even pop up on ecommerce sites: At Loft, you can enter your email address for a 40-percent friends and family discount, or, like a total chump, you can click, "No thanks, I prefer to pay full price."

On many sites that use these overlays, if you look to the bottom left corner when one of them appears, you’ll see the words, "Powered by Bounce Exchange." Bounce Exchange is a three-year-old New York-based start-up focused on conversion strategy, and its co-founder and CEO Ryan Urban is the mastermind behind the "no thanks" pop-up. Bounce Exchange’s 103 employees work with companies like Hearst — the parent of Cosmopolitan and Elle — Rodale — the owner of Women’s Health — the Reader’s Digest Association, Gannett, and more to optimize the time your eyeballs spend online.

Image: Women's Health

Urban described the work his company does as analyzing visitors’ "digital body language." When users’ clicks show that they’re consuming a lot of a certain type of content, or conversely, when their cursors show "exit intent" — movement toward the dreaded "close tab" — Bounce Exchange is able to respond in kind, with an overlay that might try to leverage their loyalty into nabbing an email address, or one that might direct them toward some content that will keep them engaged.

Writer Claire Zulkey admitted to being "weirdly fascinated" by these pop-ups. After noticing them on various sites, she wrote about them on her blog last year, compiling a list of all the ways she’d been asked to say "no thanks." "I was both amused and horrified at the same time," Zulkey said of her early encounters with the tactic. "You can’t just opt out. It’s forcing you to humiliate yourself… It makes you imagine the kind of person who would talk to you that way: if a human being came up to you and was like, ‘Do you want my new cake recipe?’ and you were like, ‘No thanks,’ and they said ‘Oh, you must like flavorless frosting!’ It’s really passive-aggressive and snobby, but in an amusing way. It’s just so obnoxious that I sort of enjoy them." Zulkey added that she couldn’t see the sites she reads more regularly or has bookmarked talking down to readers in such a way.

When asked about opt-out messages with a negative bent, Urban called the language "playful." He was also quick to point out that the pop-ups are tailored to the audience and don’t "attack" visitors the way other sites might. Instead of asking for an email address right away, for example, Urban said Bounce Exchange gives users a better experience by waiting until they’ve spent some time on the site and demonstrated their interests by clicking around. Most importantly, Urban added, these pop-ups get results.

Image: Marie Claire

According to Beth Buehler, Rodale’s senior vice president of digital operations and strategy, the company’s brands have been working with Bounce Exchange for about two years in order to increase visitor email address acquisition. Echoing Urban’s point about providing a better experience for visitors than the attack-you-as-soon-as-you-arrive publisher sites, Buehler said via email that, "During a test phase [Bounce Exchange has] successfully driven a significant amount of new-to-file email addresses, while being able to provide our users something (such as exclusive content) in exchange." Buehler said that Bounce exchange works with Rodale’s "digital partnerships team and circulation marketing team." (Women’s Health’s online editor directed inquiries toward Rodale publicists. Hearst publicists and editors did not respond to requests for comment about their work with Bounce Exchange.)

Joanna Wiebe was initially skeptical of Bounce Exchange. Wiebe has been a copywriter for over 10 years and co-runs the blog Copyhackers. She specializes in conversion copywriting, which, unlike some more fluid forms of copywriting, "is designed to move the prospect to act," she said — this is what Bounce Exchange is trying to accomplish with its pop-ups. When she and her partner first noticed the Bounce Exchange pop-ups, the blog put up a post calling their tactics "scuzzy." "Where we came from at Copyhackers was we looked at this and thought, ‘OK, it’s one thing to get good conversion rates out of that,’" Wiebe said. "But what is it doing for your brand? Is it making your brand look bad because you are now are an aggressive brand that says nasty things about its users or prospects?"

Image: Food and Wine

But then Bounce Exchange got in touch, and Copyhackers agreed to work with them as an experiment. "We’ve seen at least three times the sign-ups that we used to see," Wiebe said of her site’s email list growth since last October. "They’ve been really clever to work with." The experiment is ongoing; Bounce Exchange doesn’t charge Copyhackers for its services, and Wiebe said she suspects that this is because the blog is such a good source of referrals.

In Wiebe’s opinion, the power of Bounce Exchange is not in aggressiveness or negativity, but in presenting consequences: "That opt-out makes the user have to make this choice and understand that there’s a consequence that comes with not opting in. And it’s not necessarily the world’s worst consequence — nothing will explode, nothing terrible will happen — but you have to say, ‘No, I don’t want this today.’ That’s very different. Actually saying no is very different than saying nothing at all."

Buehler did not provide figures on how Rodale’s performance has been affected by its partnership with Bounce Exchange, only saying that the company has "seen no reduction in engagement." As for how readers have responded to the pop-ups, "We are focused on our user," she said, "So it comes back again to testing. We test, adjust, and move forward with the initiatives that work the best for our users."

Image: Cosmopolitan

Wiebe said, even after working with the company, she still finds some of Bounce Exchange’s language overly negative or aggressive. "I haven’t changed my point of view at all on what it is to message in an aggressive way or to make people feel bad… If Bounce Exchange came to us and said ‘Let’s do a test where we do negative, aggressive messaging,’ I would not go for that. I don’t even care if that would quadruple our opt-ins; it’s not something that works for our brand. I don’t want to be associated with being negative or making a person feel bad about themselves."

But Wiebe added that in such cases, maybe the problem lies not with the opt-in/opt-out strategy, but, say, with whoever’s trying to market certain lifestyles and attitudes in the first place. "It’s going back to the marketer at [that magazine] that thinks that it should sell bikini bodies to people. Sure, that negative opt-out button will make people feel bad about themselves, and it might increase conversion. It’s not the button that’s evil; it’s the person behind it."

To which anybody is free to say: no thanks.