5 ways to break the clutter in digital advertising

Congratulations, humans! You are now worse than goldfish. We have notoriously defeated the goldfish in terms of attention span! According to a Microsoft study, humans had 8.5 seconds of attention span in the year 2015, versus that of 12 seconds in the year 2000. A goldfish is attentive for 9 seconds at a stretch.

How to cope with the plethora of content and ads being thrown at us every time we browse the internet and the increasingly short attention span? Challenge for us as a marketer, normal for us as a consumer. Sounds like bad news, right? If only we had a magic wand for all other content to vanish when the user sees our communication! How to enhance the remembrance of a communication has been a key challenge for marketers and now it has become completely inevitable.

Here are 5 ways to address this challenge.

1.      Create content that is in a sachet - not a huge bottle!

Small power packed content can speak a great deal more. There will always be outliers but until you have a very strong storyline - keep your communication to less than a minute long. The success of 6 second bumper ads on YouTube and the short videos on Instagram are testimony to this. A great example is the Old Spice bumper ad, which says "Tell your armpits to stop crying like a baby with Old Spice Sweat Defense". Short. Simple. Powerful.

The key is to choose one USP and drive home the point. Do not try to say too many things in the same communication. Instead create multiple short forms of communication if you want to highlight varied key selling points.

2.      Be a Raconteur

Everyone loves listening to stories. Weave in a theme that would connect with the audience, but make sure that the brand connect happens in the first few seconds of the communication, or else people will remember the story but maybe not your brand. Another good way for people to remember you is also to build engagement with the creative. That could help in high recall.

One great example last year was Ariel #ShareTheLoad, which shows how a father regrets that he never shared the load of household chores, especially laundry with his wife, and hence his daughter is oblivious to the fact that she is being expected to handle all of it alone. It subtly ties in the brand, riding on the popular issue of gender inequality.

The brand, however, must decide what stand it would like to take. Some brands are more comfortable staying away from controversial or sensitive issues and that is perfectly fine. Just make sure that the story is enticing and the brand glues in.

3.      Promotion is as important as the production of content!

Getting the content right is no piece of cake. Oh, you got it right? Awesome. Now comes the real challenge. How to make sure the right people see it, at the right time, in the right place, and with the right amount of attention?

The first question to yourself here should be : How well do you know your audience? And more importantly, how well do you know your “online audience”? If you already know the audience that has engaged with your communication in the past, then instead of splurging your money on a blind bet, spend more resources on an audience that is most likely to connect with your messaging. Be it demographic, geographic, interest or topic based, life stage based, lookalike audiences or retargeting, reaching out to the right set of audience goes a long way in getting the bang for the buck, instead of spreading yourself too thin. You should also make sure that you do exclude converters for remarketing, or tailor the messaging for cross selling or up selling. A good way of broadening your audience base would be to market to similar audience or lookalike audience, which means creating lists of people with similar browsing behavior as your current audience.

However, if this is one of your first few communications online and you are still figuring out who are the people really engaging with you, use very simple targeting like an age and geographic filter and see how it goes. Then, during the course of the campaign, you can narrow down the audience based on your observations.

4.      Simple is beautiful.

A lucid, comprehensible message is far better than an interesting yet complicated communication, which can leave the user confounded. I will keep this point simple enough ??

Source : Pinterest

5.      Communication Overdose? Not good.

Getting exposed to the same creative time and again can cause irritation. This becomes all the more important when you are retargeting users. We all have faced it. Bombarded with the same creative from a brand to a point where we develop a dislike towards the brand itself.

In fact, efficiency decreases as you keep increasing the frequency of exposure beyond a certain limit.

Source : Adespresso

There is no set answer to ideal frequency capping, but it should ideally stay below 10.

So now you know that you can deal with the bad news. Well, but is it all that bad? Ever heard of blessing in disguise?

Shorter attention spans have also blessed us with more room to make mistakes.. and move on! With experimentation comes risks, and with risk comes mistakes. However, with the overload of information and controversies around us, we move on pretty quickly.

Take Twitter, for example. Something just trends for a few hours, and something else replaces it then. Attention gets quickly diverted to the new issue at hand.

So, fret not if the content got criticized. People will forget it soon and take your learnings from it. But yes, DO fret if you are not taking forward all your learnings from the past campaign. Because then you are not harnessing the true power of digital.

Are you still reading? Pat yourself on the back, the goldfish has beaten you, this one time :)