Every so often we like to highlight certain aspects of direct marketing. We’ve done this with various forms of lead generation, pure CPC arbitrage, and most recently with the incentive promotion space. The focus today leads me to think that Google does indeed use behavioral targeting. However they target, one tends to find its way to the top of my Gmail account seemingly more than any other. It’s clever, maybe even a little too clever, but it represents a style of advertising that has quickly popularized itself among a handful of smart, savvy, and hungry marketers. Whether you like or approve of their methods, they are the uber-converters, moving at light speed and responding to input in seemingly real time. What we see here is the next iteration of incentive promotion – a style of marketing and user flow unique to a group of offers with high, broad appeal and effective run of network monetization.
Ad
The copy I saw read:
3 New Friend Request
Its Scary Accurate to See Who Wants To Be Your Friend. Find Out Now!
yournewcrush.com/Friends
Landing Page
Clicking on the ad as well as typing in copy and pasting the display URL takes you to the following lading page.
If we look back at the ad, we see that it talks about a friend request and hints at some prediction service for seeing whom they might be. A review of the landing page talks not of a friend request but of a "Crush." It also mentions, "Contact Your Secret Lover Now!" Both are very compelling but potentially not in tune with the ad. One reason for the difference is that this landing page has been used to promote a different offer, one that had an ad more in line with the crush theme.
Select your gender and you go to…
Step 2
Step 2 keeps the same header (Find Your Crush) and sub-header (Contact Your Secret Lover Now!) as the landing page. If, like me, you happen to be male, you’ll notice the URL on step two looks like this, "http://www.yournewcrush.com/reg4/index2.php?gender=female." It took us a bit, but the difference is explained later. Some offers of this flow will ask the user’s astrological sign here instead of month. Notice the cute graphics for the months. Select your month (in your head since this isn’t real), and join us for Step 3.
Step 3
Chances are by this point, you probably have forgotten what exactly you came to the site to do and are curious to see where it leads. If you had the text of the ad clearly in your head, you might start to wonder why you need to supply your age in order to find out who is behind the friend request(s). As consumers though, we are so accustomed to providing various levels of personally identifiable information especially in this social network / transparency work in which we live. Select an age 18 or greater and you arrive at…
Step 4
That’s right, now it’s time to select your day of birth. You’ve already filled out your age, which should make it easier to part with the day, especially since you’ve come this far (although you’re just a tad more than halfway through). And, while it doesn’t feel like it, with this step, you have provided them with your exact birthday. Step two was month, then came current age, and finally day. You didn’t provide the year of your birth, but that can be calculated with what you provided. Take a guess what’s next. Then move to the next step and see how you fared.
Step 5
Interesting, right? I certainly wouldn’t have guessed ethnicity. Then again, according to the ad, they are predicting, or at least that’s the implication when they say “see who wants to be your friend.” In order for their "Scary Accurate" formula to work, perhaps it needs ethnicity. It’s at this point though that you might have paused or even closed out. We’ll get to that scenario later.
Step 6
If you guessed first name or name for Step 5, you almost had it. If you guessed email you almost had it too. Here, they want it all, not name but your nickname, email address, confirm email address and zip code (which comes pre-filled based on your IP). Under email address, they have it cleverly worded to try and get valid email address, "Hint: use a real email, no spam, we hate that stuff." The grammar either shows the target audience or the the age of those behind this. It’s here, though, that you start to get a feel for the real purpose of the ad. With the information it collects, it starts to look and feel like a site that’s trying to get you to sign up for something. The big question remains for what? The answer to that isn’t answered directly on this step, but if you paid attention while going through the steps, you will have noticed that on this page, additional footer text appears. On all other pages, it’s a link to their Terms and Conditions and their gmail contact information.
Here for the first time we see mention of Dada. It’s not a parental thing but one of the largest mobile marketers, based in Italy. From this text, it becomes clear that if you hit submit, or in this case "Continue", you are most likely being signed up for something. Unfortunately, it’s not clear from the site that this is the case, but you’re Spidey-sense is most likely right.
Step 7
In the previous step, we had a feeling that we might be signing up for something. Here we can almost be guaranteed of it. Asking for a password means setting up an account with someone in my mind. Since we read the fine print, we know it has to do with Dada. It’s still not clear from this step just what we’re signing up for and what that means. Dada’s Terms tell you most of this, but you’d have to do some deducing to connect this site with Dada.
Step 8
Looks like I just made the publisher some money, but we now have an answer as to what we were joining – love.dada.net, which as it turns out is a dating site. All of the sudden, the site text throughout the form process seems actually appropriate. On the love.dada.net site, you might just find your crush and/or contact your secret lover. By arriving at this point, you made somebody money, but you were not charged. That comes, like a normal dating site, if you want to connect with someone.
Here’s how Dada makes money; they would like you to join their premium mobile service that comes with date functionality along with content (ringtones and wallpapers).
Other – Exit Pop 1 / 2
Perhaps among the most interesting additions to this user flow are its exit pops, which aren’t exit pops but warning prompts. We’ll cover these in upcoming issues.
Other – Terms
Perhaps the one thing for sure the publisher needs to address immediately is this. Given the amount of personal information collected and potential confusion that comes with the flow, they need to make sure people can figure out what is involved.
I suspect this whole process will divide those who read this into those who find it acceptable and those who find it inappropriate. It’s not obvious if this is a site run by Dada, run with their permission, or as is often the case, done with a blind eye (but a blind eye that can include the end advertiser). A question for you, do you think people feel they are owed something by going through this process, i.e. does the average user do so because they think some form of consideration is waiting for them (a name, a warm contact), as opposed to them being signed up for something?
Network
