Marketers, Hold Your Fire: Remember that You’re an Audience Member, Too

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

At its best, advertising can be a boon to producer and audience member alike.  I believe this to be true, even though I am almost always an advertising-avoider.

When I read newspapers, I often miss all the information in charts, graphs, and displays.  I've developed an automatic reflex over the years to believe anything that's boxed off is an advertisement, so my eyes just follow the copy.  When I watch television, my thumb automatically flexes at a commercial break, and I never watch a show when it's actually airing anymore, so that I can cut an hour down to 40 minutes or so.  When I'm surfing the Web, I tune out anything flashing in a display box, and I manage to go through pages of search without even noticing the sponsored ads that appear at the top and sides of pages.

Maybe I'm missing out, because I found a post recently via Ilya Vedrashko's Ad Lab.  Ilya linked to this post from Royal Pingdom, which highlights some hilarious mistargeted search ads, as well as some very clever uses of search.

(As an aside, a keyword search for Hell might pull up a travel site offering low rates for those visiting the fiery destination.  Meanwhile, eBay seems to have everything for sale: you can sell your kids, your soul, or used diapers on the auction site.  See more here and here.  On the clever end comes ads cleverly targeting recent news, as well as ads written in response to other ads.  See a search ad appearing after GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann was fired saying "They Fired Jeff? Get reviews at PC Gamer instead." Soon, GameBump.com took out a targeted search ad that started appearing below that one, saying, "Yes, They Fired Jeff...Someone losing their job isn't the right time for selling magazines.")

So there you have it. I can spend significant time amused by advertisements, but not when they're framed as ads.  I'll ignore them if I think they are hawking to me.  If it's presented to me as content, though, these ads have my engaged attention.  That's what makes me wonder why companies don't dump their commercial archives on YouTube, why corporate sites for products seem to have so little information, and so on.

From boomers on down, we have a media environment today where the vast majority of the U.S. population grew up in an advertising and branding-saturated environment. That means people have grown quite adept at commercial avoidance, a fact I'd suspect many of us implicitly know.  The question is how to use the growing technologies of targeting marketing messages in ways that present them as content people want sent to them or else seek out, rather than an intrusion thrust upon them.

I'm not suggesting that companies make comical mistakes to attract our ironic attention, but there are transparent ways to present information, brand messages, etc. as content rather than interruption of content.  Targeted search ads, branded entertainment, spreadable online content, extensive product information and discussion forums, carefully thought-out and organic product placement, and so on all provide potential opportunities to reframe advertising without invading or bombarding the audience.

In short, I’m not a believer that ubiquity is the new exclusivity--at least when that ubiquity means inundating the audience with content pushed at them, with little strategy involved.

I'm a believer that the best business solutions are the ones that ultimately resonate with the audience at large, rather than trying to make the audience bend to a marketer's will.  After all, those marketers are audience members, too.

Comments

[Scott Ellington]

I think I can site a case-in-point in HULU, where, in the course of a single episode or movie, a single advertiser's single message is repeated at the act-breaks. Rather than telling an evolving tale (about product) that rivals the level of engagement of the episode I chose to watch, the advertiser sponsors repetitious tedium and subsidizes monotony.

More often than not, commercial advertisements insult the curiosity of the potential customer.

[Sam Ford]

Very good point. It's a model in which impressions are set up as the end game, and recollection is the victory. Did people remember seeing your ad? Yes? Then it was a success! They'll know the brand now. Who cares if they have a positive feeling about it. The message was successful if we forced them to notice it. That's the kind of logic that causes an oversaturation of branding, etc. It's the opposite of targeted marketing and smart advertising: you know, the kind of marketing that takes a message people might like to know about it and gets it to them.