Today I spent 241.81 seconds to complete the fun “Terms and Conditions” game. The game is simple but devious:
You start with a barrage of popups. You have to opt out and reject more and more complex attempts to track you, to get you signed up to a newsletter, to trick you into something you don’t want.
One of the popups is in Morse code.
A few contain logical puzzles you have to solve.
One I still haven’t figured out, because it seems to be a game of chance, like simplified roulette.
Anyways, my point is this sounds a lot like the world of online direct marketing.
Escalating armaments on both sides… with marketers coming up with new and clever ways to trick prospects into clicking, opting in, and buying… and prospects scrambling to fight back and protect their privacy, their attention, and their wallets.
Perhaps I am just lazy. But I find it to be a revolting amount of wasted effort on both sides. Like both marketers and prospects are running on parallel hamster wheels, trying to outpace the other guy.
I don’t mean to get all heavy on you. But I will point out that there are direct marketers who have figured out how to step off the hamster wheel and still keep making good money.
I’m sure there are many ways you can do it. I’ve already written about one such way, which I called the “Brand Marketing Rapture”.
But there are others, and I will probably write about them in the future. If you don’t want to miss that… you can sign up to my newsletter (beware, an optin form will pop up) by clicking here.