Provision 4.2 of ISO 9001:2015 cites “Needs and Expectations of Interested Parties.” Interested parties include not only obvious stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, and owners), but also anybody who is affected, or perceives himself as being affected, by the product or service.
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Not all interested parties are, however, relevant. In “Getting Ready for ISO 9001:2005,” Paula Oddy notes that, “Typical examples of relevant interested parties could be direct customers, end users, suppliers, distributors, retailers, and partners.”
The concept of interested parties is extremely relevant to web page advertising. If you are the owner of the website, the advertiser (or advertising agency) that is paying for the ad is your obvious customer. The web page’s reader may be a potential customer for whatever is being advertised, but she is not the customer of the advertiser. She is, however, an interested party with the power to ban the advertiser’s content from her computer. This, in turn, reduces the advertiser’s revenue and also that of the web page owner.
Most Internet users will at least tolerate unobtrusive banner ads that help pay for the Web page’s free content, and this describes the ads that appear on Quality Digest’s site. Pop-up ads that appear in the middle of what the user is trying to read or watch, ads that appear in the middle of videos (e.g., on YouTube), ads that intrude with unauthorized and unwanted audio, and ads that consume a lot of bandwidth are all, on the other hand, likely to result in permanent corrective action. Furthermore, once someone bans a domain from his computer, he is unlikely to ever again give it access. Users do not have the time to check back to see whether the advertiser has changed its practices, and will simply forget that the advertiser ever existed.
As but one example, Doubleclick had a habit, and this was back in the days of dial-up connections, of refreshing image ads on web pages. This slowed my Internet performance noticeably, so I simply added Doubleclick to my Hosts file. (As Dan Pollock explains, this is a file list of unwanted websites, each beginning with 127.0.0.1 followed by the URL of the site, so it cannot access your computer, and vice versa.) The result is that, when I put ad.doubleclick.net in my browser’s address bar, a blank page appears. I have never taken the trouble to remove all the Doubleclick URLs from my list of banned sites to find out what happens.
This advertiser has apparently not changed its ways because a Google search on ad.doubleclick.net comes up primarily with methods for blocking it. The result is, of course, that the ads don’t get seen, much less clicked on, the advertiser’s product or service goes unseen, and the site’s content owner doesn’t get paid for the clicks. This is what happens when one does not consider the needs and expectations of “other interested parties.”
Other blocking methods include parental control software and corporate web access-control software. If the latter can block access to social networking sites, it can also block access to intrusive advertising sites. Adblock Plus can, meanwhile, disable the ads that appear in the middle of YouTube videos. Were the same ad to appear elsewhere on the page, it would probably be left alone or even followed, but its intrusive nature gets it—and all others like it—banned completely.
Adblock Plus, in fact, acknowledges the benign nature of unobtrusive ads, and does not block them unless ordered explicitly to do so. “Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0 you can allow some of the advertising not considered annoying to be viewed,” says the software's creators. “By doing this you support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a nonintrusive way.” Acceptable advertising must have no sound or animations, and must not obscure the content of the page so as to require the user to close the ad before being able to access the content.
There is, incidentally, an adage that the purpose of many ornate fishing lures is to catch anglers as opposed to fish. The same is definitely true of gourmet dog food that looks good enough for people to eat, although a dog cares only about how the food smells. The same principle applies to web advertising services that offer to develop impressive-looking video ads (that start automatically) and pop-up ads. If you are the seller of the product or service, you are likely to end up paying for ads that will either irritate your potential customers, or else go unseen because the advertising agency got its domain banned from the customers’ computers long ago.
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