THE PROBLEM
In days gone by, well-read print media, billboards, cinema and free-to-air TV channels hosted the bulk of
advertising and would guarantee broad exposure! But with the introduction of a sea of cable channels, the
internet, social media and streaming, marketers are finding their ability to connect with their target audience
spread thin and covering the right media for a good result can be tricky.
Further, where advertisers were used to consumers experiencing their marketing efforts as a non-participatory audience, social media is where people choose to interact with others, and targeted advertising is regarded as a noisy intrusion.
In 1958 TV commercials represented 13% of programming, today it can be as much as 36%, no wonder that recording, Netflix, Hulu, other subscription and streaming services, have become popular.
Online, many brands ensure you are targeted based on behavioral data analysis, after weeding through a lot of selective self-serving stats, it was determined that
about 68% of Americans object to targeted advertising (The Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey). Data use has evolved into what is now known as "surveillance capitalism" and is largely being fought by activists and politicians alike world-wide. Influencing gained popularity with advertisers in the interim, but is starting to lose traction. "By 2025, 80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both" (Gartner 2019). Those figures may not have panned out to be as severe, but suggests marketers generally aren't enamored with targeting and are struggling to find alternative methods of marketing that are effective.
We live in a society with an information overload problem, and much is being tuned out. In a recent Nielsen study, they found people ignored ads when searching a webpage. Heatmaps tracked the eye movements of participants for three levels of attention: scanning, partial reading, and thorough reading. During all three tasks, the banners and ads were completely ignored, sometimes referred to as "ad blindness."
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/banner-blindness-old-and-new-findings/
Gas pump TV advertising really irritates, clicking on email, texts and ads seems increasingly unsafe. Google alone disabled 400,000+ ads from as many sites hiding malware during the course of a year a decade ago (WSJ, Feb 2014). Malware is a lot more sophisticated today and can cause widespread damage to networks, costing
vast sums of money to remedy or pay off ransomware attacks.
But, marketing that's coming at you has become a lot more suspect. With AI, targeted advertising's content and images can be artificially created and/or faked and delivery methods honed in seconds, to become far more effective and influential in directing your thinking, buying and voting patterns. Is this surveillance capitalism
supercharged!? Personalizing marketing has shown some improvement in consumer engagement levels in the short term, but personalizing won't make you trust a product or service, and trust is the measure needed to guarantee long-term success for your brand.
All indicators are that advertising volume will continue to grow. It follows that the percentage of people tuning out or blocking the noise will increase. This means that the real ROI on advertising should decline over time!
The average person is learning to become immune to the advertising bombardment by sellers, and isn't going gaga over their products or services, even less spreading the news to others.
So to the savvy advertiser's dismay, the industry is engineering itself into a brick wall.
It's floundering!
IS THERE A BETTER WAY?!
Nurture personal recommendation, face-to-face or through social media. And rather than presume it will bend to your marketing framework, conforming to social media's communication dynamic maybe a friendlier, far more effective way to market your product/service, taking full advantage of its ability to spread your word virally.
Some of the most enjoyable buying experiences relate to finding a unique product/service
and passing on your ”discovery” by word of mouth or virally over web-based social media
at a rate that simply was not possible several years ago. I believe the viral capability is that
much more enhanced if the product/service isn’t seen as an effort by advertisers to shove
it down our throats. By de-structuring traditional marketing elements, reducing or hiding
your logo altogether, downplaying advertising and experiential marketing and focusing
marketing efforts instead on the new, more subtle task of enhancing a “discovery” process,
certain brands may better conform to, and find acceptance in, a jaded consumer market!
What's more is that Steve Jobs grew Apple from almost bankrupt to the world's most valuable company at that time using those very principles:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/apples-social-media-presence-tristan-slothouber/
As did others with eye-popping success:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/avoiding-advertising-money-pit-tristan-slothouber/
I think these examples make it evident that the current advertising/marketing model has long been bested, the question is, when will you get on board to move your organization's income potential forward?
