Marketers used to be able to get away with intrusive advertising, placing online ads as pop-ups, highly distractive Flash animations, and a variety of other methods designed specifically to grab shoppers’ attention. However, consumers have changed and are no longer enticed by ads (or other marketing tactics) that interrupt them… it’s as though they now have a built-in attention spam filter that automatically blocks the ads from their awareness.
As shoppers are bombarded with information, they have become resistant to intrusive advertising. Advertising that is poorly-timed, irrelevant, and/or interrupts a current task quickly becomes an annoyance rather than an incentive to pay attention.