Posting Date: November 19, 2002

Comments by the Chief Marketing Officer for Orbitz -- "The reality is they work really well. We get one complaint for every 3,500 to 4,000 sales we do. That's a pretty good ratio. And I ultimately believe that consumers vote with their pocket books. We're getting a lot of sales from these pop-unders and ultimately we're being successful, I think."

Reader Comments...

It's interesting to see that every one of our competitors has now followed us," said Sands.

The author encouraged web surfers to e-mail Sands every time they see a pop-under saying that they're "not interested, but thanks for asking!"

As Orbitz are claiming responsibility for the glut of pop-under ads then maybe we should start e-mailing him every time we see one that annoys us.

His address is msands@orbitz.com

I know that I am much less likely to distribute or publicise a link to a page that contains ads. Do the ad hosting pages care about this?

Posted by: Mac on November 20, 2002 07:41 AM

Mac, you should hyperlink properly, like this: His email address is msands@orbitz.com.

Oops, does that mean spambots will scrape it? Sorry!

Posted by: MadMan on November 20, 2002 12:20 PM

Don't they say for every complaint you receive there are another 100 not made.

I wonder what the break even analysis says about the number of complaints vs. the sales that are made. Obviously 1 in 4,000 sales is Ok, but what if it was 500 for ever 4,000 sales....it's an interesting brand related question.

Posted by: JB on November 20, 2002 04:52 PM

Do people even know HOW to complain about these ads? You could spend an hour or more hunting around for an e-mail address, and who has that kind of time? I'm surprised he gets as many complaints as he says he does with that kind of obstacle. He is either deluded or just plain dumb if he doesn't realize that the majority of people will just prefer to leave the site and not return than hunt around for an hour for a place to complain.

Posted by: Lydia on November 20, 2002 05:23 PM

"Don't they say for every complaint you receive there are another 100 not made."

It can be far higher than that. I once worked on a site that developed a fundamental flaw (not my fault, honest guv) which made key features unusable, yet out of thousands of visitors while the site was broken for a couple of days not one sent in a complaint, despite contact details being clearly available.
I suppose it largely depends on how involved users feel with the site, for popup ads there's virtually no sense of involvement.

Posted by: Matt Round on November 21, 2002 03:31 AM

Hmmm... Is he just saying, "Advertise through us?"

Posted by: Ron Zeno on November 23, 2002 03:02 PM

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