I first realized I was the victim of so-called adware when I kept getting Citibank’s C2it popup ad whenever I visited PayPal.¹

You can tell from the popup header that this ad is being served by
n-CASE, one of the leading adware utilities.

If you have been getting complaints about popup advertisements appearing at your Web site, your customers are likely the victims of the latest Internet annoyance, adware, also known as spyware.

Adware/spyware are hidden utilities that display popup ads at set intervals or when users visit certain sites. For example, an advertiser could display ads whenever a user visited The Wall Street Journal Online without paying Dow Jones a cent. To the user the ad has more credibility because they think it was delivered by the WSJ. It’s a double whammy for ad-supported sites. Not only does the publisher lose revenue, its users can become aggravated by popup ads for potentially offensive products.

Adware can also be used to display ads on competitor’s Web sites. For example, a few months ago I kept receiving Citibank C2it popups whenever I visited its largest competitor, PayPal.¹ The advertising finally stopped when I deleted n-CASE, an adware program that unbeknownst to me was running in the background of my PC.

Adware companies pay developers to bundle the spyware along with freeware/shareware programs downloaded from the Internet. Another major user of this controversial technology is Gator, whose eWallet software is used by 22 million people to assist in completing online forms. The legality of its Offer Companion, which serves ads when Gator users visit target URLs, is being tested in a court case brought by three large Web publishers: Dow Jones, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Reference: ZDNet, June 27, 2002 http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-940104.html .

Banks should do three things to fight this annoying and misleading business practice:

1.       Don’t buy advertising from these services.

2.       In your FAQ tell customers you don’t sell outside advertising, if they experience popups when visiting they may be victims of adware.²

3.       Put a link on your site to Ad-Aware  www.lavasoft.com  which can be downloaded and run in a few minutes. This free program finds and deletes spyware and adware utilities after first making backup copies. See the WSJ Boom Town column by Lee Gomes on July 15, 2002 (and resulting letters published July 19, 2002) for a good discussion of the issues.                                                8

¹ Giving Citi the benefit of the doubt, the C2it popups could have been placed by a media buyer or an affiliate without explicit consent from Citi.

² See how Google handles the popup question in its FAQ  www.google.com/help/nopopupads.html

First Looks

Coming Soon: Citibank’s new look, as shown in an online demo at citi.com .

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Today: Citi’s current home page would be OK if it weren’t for the cascading menus triggered by moving the mouse over any of the three main categories: Personal Finance, Small Business, or Corporate/Institutional. It’s hard to get back to the content under the menus; wherever you move your mouse, you trigger more cascading menus. The other serious flaw for a modern banking Web site is the lack of a link to a login page.

Sources: WSJ = Wall Street Journal, AB = American Banker, BTN = Bank Technology News