Advertising and You – The Full Version

Introduction

This article is based on research and much internal discussion, argument, revelation and eventually agreement, all fuelled (in my case) by Monsoon Malabar.  

The exercise was conducted during the first lockdown, when the creative industry took something of a nosedive as client after client furloughed staff and closed/hibernated their businesses, or turned them to the manufacture of hand sanitiser and PPE.

From our perspective, the only good thing to come out of lockdown was perspective. 

But, despite the difficulties we encountered, we learned something massively important that we probably would not have otherwise spotted, because we were too wrapped up in project work.  That something took us all by surprise but, the more we looked into it, the more data we found to support our conclusions and the more we realised that a significant change was happening right under our noses.

I have already shared these thoughts in a series of short articles, published on LinkedIn (https://bitly.ws/aEaF) and on our website (https://www.strawman.agency/blog), but it dawned on me that it may be better to present them as a single publication.

So, as we are in our second lockdown, it seemed sensible to use the opportunity to review the research and conclusions and to write that article.  It’s quite a read but it’s also quite a topic.

I hope you enjoy the article, please comment or contact me if you have questions or thoughts you’d like to share.

If you really don’t want to read the whole article, skip to the final chapter "Of Social Media and Ostriches" for the précis, but you might miss out on some good stuff.

It’s not new.  Advertising is known to date back at least as far as Babylonia in 3000 BC. Vendors would promote their wares by taking to the streets and shouting their sales messages.  Later promotions became more formalised and an Egyptian papyrus, from around 1000 BC and subtly advertising the wares of a fabric seller, can be seen in the British Museum.  

(There is also evidence to suggest that this was a very effective campaign and the business flourished)

A business opportunity was created, although it was some time before it was grasped.  Expertise in promoting your products and services was not necessarily something you had in-house, but there were plenty of individuals who had ideas and wanted to sell them.

The first record of a specialist advertising agency is attributed to William Taylor in London in 1786, followed some 50 years later by Volney B Palmer in the USA.  From relatively humble beginnings, the advertising industry began to grow.

For the next 200 years advertising was almost entirely seen in newspapers and magazines but, by the 1950’s, rapidly increasing growth in electronic devices, in the form of television and radio, had changed the industry for ever.  Suddenly advertisers had a route directly into people’s homes and, ultimately, into their thoughts and desires.

Budgets spiralled upwards as the big brands vied for market dominance.  Advertising agencies entered a golden era, beatifully characterised by the mini-series Mad Men.  The rapid growth of television gave agencies a rich-content format to exploit.  As budgets grew and agencies expanded, so the advertising became more and more elaborate and sophisticated (therefore more expensive).  Campaigns began to take on a life of their own.  Think of the aliens in the Smash campaigns, Meercats for Compare the Market and the love story that drew viewers in their millions to the Gold Blend campaign.  Catchphrases such as “because you’re worth it”, “it does what it says on the tin” and, unfortunately, “wazuuuup” entered our daily language.

Companies were spending millions of dollars per campaign, in order to stay ahead of the competition.  It was an arms race in which only the very largest companies could compete.  It did mean, however, that advertising was, through necessity, crafted to very high standards of both creativity and production.  Adverts became an entertainment format in their own right.

The famous quote attributed to John Wanamaker - “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half” – began to haunt company finance directors as six-figure cheque after six-figure cheque was raised to ensure they had the best advertising.  But they couldn’t stop.  Every time a brand launched a newer, bigger and brighter campaign, competing brands had to outdo it to stay in the game.  The only real winners were the advertising agencies, whose budgets by then could fund a small country and still leave change to treat the directors to private jets and enormous expense accounts.

But, like all golden eras, it could not go on forever.

It’s 1993.  Enter the internet.  The great democratiser.  The World Wide Web protocol, brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, was far more than just a communications tool for scientists and nerds.  It was going to connect the world and allow people to share ideas, stay in contact with friends on the other side of the world as easily as friends on the other side of the street and, of course, to look at endless photographs of kittens.  

It would also enable small companies to compete on an equal footing with large companies.  Allow individuals to address a wider market and sell their goods and services globally.

Idea after idea to grab attention and sell products was tried.  From 1994, banner adverts, targeted display, pop-ups, bulk email all came, annoyed the general public and mostly went away again.  (In 2014 Ethan Zuckerman, inventor of the pop-up advert, publicly apologised for his invention)

By 2000, the buzz-phrase of the world wide web, “content is king”, took hold.  Everybody and anybody with a small amount of technical expertise could and did begin to generate content through blogs and websites.  They flooded the internet with oceans, not just streams, of consciousness.  (To put this into context, in 1993 there were 130 known websites.  Within 10 years that number was almost 41 million, with over ? billion users)

Just two years after its launch in 1998, Google set out its commercial stall with AdWords.  Not a new idea but Google’s rapid market domination, allied to the vast numbers of websites being published and searches being carried out in the content explosion, made it work.  For a while.

The next big change began in 2004, after a few social-media false starts had come and gone.  Another revolution was about to upset everything again.

The basis was that users (by this time almost a billion of them) no longer needed to be tech-savvy to generate content.  Facebook, and a seemingly endless parade of copycat start-ups, made it simple to create on-line content with very little technical ability and even less thought or censorship.  The wide uptake of easy to install home broadband and WiFi, enabled people to access on-line content quickly and easily.  And they did.

User-generated content began to wash over the internet like a tsunami.  A tsunami that had first passed through a landfill site, and a sewage works.  The number of internet users climbed rapidly, doubling in less than three years, feeding the content storm and creating a world glut of kitten photos.

Tech giants, such Google and Microsoft, along with a plethora of VC funded start-ups like YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, launched their social media offerings (or bought other people’s) giving internet users an ever-expanding range of ways to upload their thoughts, photographs of puppies now the kittens have run out, videos and dreams for general consumption.

Amid all of the user-generated content, companies and advertisers spotted opportunities to engage with their customers and their target markets.  To have a two-way conversation at a personal level and to encourage their customers to become unpaid brand champions was the dream.  To be able to do this without spending millions every year made it a totally compelling proposition for small and large companies alike.  And everybody jumped on to the bandwagon-towing gravy train.

Then it began to go wrong.

In its “golden age”, advertising was a significant part of, and influence upon, popular culture, far more than it is today.  New advertising campaigns were frequently discussed and even praised in popular media.  It wasn’t unusual for morning coffee-break conversations to be about the latest commercials, creating as much discussion and comment as the sport or TV programmes seen the night before.  

Characters such as JR Hartley became a household name as well as the subject of numerous comedy sketches, whilst a self-parodying Michael Winner calmed everybody down with his insurance advert appearances.  At the more artistic end of the spectrum, Sony’s bouncing balls commercial combined incredibly high production values with a haunting soundtrack.  Then Honda broke the mould with their TV advert “Cog”, a mechanical ballet that led the viewer through a slow and beautifully crafted choreography of interacting car parts to reach the finished product.  

To the viewer, the product increasingly appeared to be secondary to the artistry of the advert and it wasn’t unusual for the advert cost to be higher than the television programme it interrupted.

The phenomenon that transformed advertising to this mass-culture status was the “Creative Revolution”.   In the decade from 1960-1970, the storytelling power of 30-second TV commercials matured into an art form in its own right.

The “Swinging Sixties” wrought many social changes.  Growing youth culture, sexual revolution, increased wealth and freedom from the post war restrictions and austerity of the 1950s.  Advertising agencies began to use high quality art direction and copy to create adverts that gave the warm feeling of shared confidences, rather than a straightforward promotional message.

This Creative Revolution was a vivid departure from traditional print, radio, and early television advertising that focused on fact-based arguments, why your brand was better than its competition.  Instead it used an intuitive understanding of what goes on inside the mind of the consumer – the realisation that establishing an emotional connection between brand and consumer could be far more effective than a hard sell or a competitive positioning argument.

This philosophy continued up to the millennium.  Its influence remained strong and advertising produced by the leading agencies followed the trend that began in the 60s.  Some of the most celebrated advdrts of all time were launched in the 80s and 90s and still resonate today, even if their content can seem highly inappropriate to contemporary eyes.

But there was a change coming.  In the early 2000s, the Internet began to increase its share of consumers’ media time.  As technology made access easier and cheaper, audiences began to change their viewing and their buying habits dramatically.

Companies followed the audience and today, over 50% of advertising spending is on digital media.

But consumer response to advertising on digital media is very different from that on television for a number of reasons.

Research shows that up to two-thirds of consumers find on-line adverts annoying.  Even more condemning is the fact over 30 percent of consumers (and in increasing numbers) have installed adblocker programs to shield themselves from advertising.

Why?

Is it because they now view advertising on a smartphone, computer, or other digital device as opposed to a TV?  

Or maybe ads just don’t connect with the consumer anymore, because of the dumbing-down of creativity in advertising?  

When budgets were enormous, advertising attracted and indeed relied on some of the finest creative minds on the planet.  Many of these creatives went on to produce and direct blockbuster movies, including such notables as Alfred Hitchcock and Ridley Scott.  (This migration also worked in reverse, with directors like Martin Scorcese turning their attentions to advertising film making)

Some adverts became hailed as works of art in their own right.  Famous artists, as an example Andy Warhol, turned to the iconography of advertising in some of their most celebrated work.  

In the “Golden Age”, standards had to be high in order to retain the attention of the audience because the delivery channels were limited, and competition was strong within all the major brands

Now anyone with a smartphone or a hand-held camera can call themselves a film maker.  The fact that production costs are so low has resulted in a tidal wave of low-quality creative flooding the social media feeds that dominate our lives.

So, we have a two-fold issue.  A massive fall in the quality of messaging paralleled by a massive increase in intrusion.

Consumers’ turn-off from advertising is mental and physical exhaustion from too much media exposure.  Research by eMarketer estimates that in 2019 the average consumer was engaged over nine hours each day on digital media and TV.

With greater media exposure comes more commercials.  In 1970s, most consumers saw commercials while watching three hours of primetime television.  With digital media and more time of exposure, industry sources estimate that today’s consumer’s daily total is 5,000 to 12,000 advertisements

We also suggest that digital technology has changed the relationship between the consumer and media. 

If “the medium is the message” then new media technology changed how consumers experience advertising and, perhaps more importantly, how they respond to it.

The smartphone is the primary media source for 40 percent of UK adults and 60 percent of those under thirty.  Research reports that 76 times a day the average user initiates and receives calls and texts, watches videos, uses apps, and conducts searches.  While doing this, they click, type, swipe, and tap on their phones 2,617 times! 

Smartphone technology has dramatically altered consumers’ media experience.  Think about watching an advertisement on the small screen of a smartphone.  It is a very different experience from sitting on the couch and watching television.

So, where does this lead us?

A lot has happened that affects how consumers feel about advertising:  a change in media behavior because of technology, overstimulation from near-constant exposure to media, and inundation by advertising messages at levels far beyond possible awareness and processing.

But there is a much more important factor that marketers and advertisers have not considered in their efforts to create advertising on digital media that consumers like. 

The technology has changed, but the mind of the consumer has remained the same. Today’s edition of the human mind likes engaging stories that are full of emotion - just like its predecessor did in 1970.  Herein lies the problem and the underlying reason for the Boomerang Curve’s application to current marketing channels.

If we look at the way in which novel digital advertising strategies over the past 20 years have appeared, grown and then almost vanished again, we see a correlation.

Fig 1 In the early days of a new idea or channel, because uptake is typically restricted to early adopters, the strategy can be highly cost effective.

Fig 2 As the approach gains traction and early adopters are clearly seeing results, the (generally more conservative) marketing departments of larger companies jump on board.  Budgets swell and, with them, competition for space within the channel.  Prices increase and the channel becomes flooded to the point at which its effectiveness begins to wane.

Fig 3 We then see the channel is dominated by companies with the biggest budgets, but consumers are beginning to resist (ad blockers and pop-up blockers for example)

Fig 4 Because the approach is now high-profile, large numbers of ‘agencies’ start pushing the concept to the smaller brands, but this is verging on mis-selling.  As an example, consider how, a few years ago, your inbox was flooded with emails promising you ‘first page listing on Google for $50 per month’. Eventually both the audience and the brands become disillusioned and the channel settles down to a low level of utilisation and effectiveness.

What does this mean today?

The massive uptake in the use of social media channels for advertising is rapidly moving social media along the Boomerang Curve.  For example, approximately every fourth Instagram post and one in five Facebook posts is an advert.  Because it is easy and inexpensive to create short video clips and photographs using readily available technology, the market is becoming flooded with small companies offering ‘social media management’.  This has the effect of driving creative costs down because the agencies are in such a crowded marketplace.  The knock-on effect is that quality also falls away and the adverts become dull and unimaginative.  Consumers are less engaged, and we see the channel pushed further and further along the Boomerang Curve.

What was a highly effective and engaging way of communicating with your customers is becoming an increasingly irritating interruption in their media consumption.  At the same time, even though “creative” spend is low, the media channels are able to continue to increase their rates because of increasing demand from the bigger names.  Your costs go up and the effectiveness of the channel falls.

So…

Each medium must find its narrative voice and learn to tell a story through its technology.

Before advertisers can use digital media to its full potential, you first must learn how to use it to tell stories that consumers like.

What to do when the Boomerang comes back

Drop it. 

OK maybe that’s a tad extreme.  There is merit in retaining legacy approaches to comms.  For example, it is still sensible to apply standard SEO guidelines to websites and to continue to manage your social feeds. But remember that everyone else is doing the same thing.  The effectiveness of these, once powerful, strategies has been diluted by mass, almost universal, uptake.  You need to be looking elsewhere if you are going to stand out from the crowd.

Let’s take a pace back

A few years ago, companies, driven by the need to reduce budgets and seduced by the success of social media, jumped headlong into social channel advertising because, in its early stages, it was very cost-effective.  As the majors joined the party, the channels became flooded and their cost-effectiveness began to fall as costs were driven upwards.  We have called this phenomenon the Boomerang Curve.

It’s not all over yet for social media, but the ROI has already fallen dramatically and will continue to do so.

Forward-looking companies want something new, something different, something that will re-engage with a wearied and disenchanted audience.  Something creative.

But where?

Precisely.  All the social channels are awash with content, both user-generated and/or advertising. Furthermore, you have no control over these channels and are at the mercy of the channel providers' algorithms!

This is a key issue and one that has not yet been fully realised by advertisers.

Free to Air Television is still only for the majors and commercial radio, whilst effective, is a rather one-dimensional and geographically limited format.

There are no really new channels.  Feeds like TikTok are springing up and taking massive market share with the youthful end of the population but it’s just more of the same.  Oh, and with the added bonus of all the social media security and content manipulation concerns that are now being voiced.

And this is the point.  The ease with which anyone who owns a smartphone can (and does) create and upload content has diluted the market to the point at which the audience is turning against it.  Furthermore, that audience is prepared to pay for advertising-free media channels, and statistics clearly demonstrate this trend.

Time to be original

There appears to be a depressing lack of creativity in the tsunami of content that fills the internet.  I know it’s there somewhere, but it is mostly submerged in the ocean of low budget sounds, images and video that assail us daily.

Edward de Bono coined the term ‘lateral thinking’ in 1967, we now call it ‘out of the box thinking’ and it’s what creative agencies are paid to do.  Approach a question in a way that defies the norm.  Use novel, unconventional methods to address the question and achieve the desired result whilst making the audience gasp in surprise, and we hope delight, at the beauty, audacity and originality of thought that produces the platform for the advertiser’s message.

VW’s “Think Small” campaign in the 1960s leaps to mind.  At a time when American cars were becoming more and more extreme in design and scale, DDB (the agency working for VW) realised that honesty was the only way to sell the VW Beetle.  In this case brutal honesty.

In 2000, John West recovered from a disastrous decade, following a botulism scare, with a humorous and memorable advert where a fisherman took on a bear in a fist fight.

I am sure you have your favourites too and I am also guessing they were not from social media feeds, or at least not originally.  I am sure you can see where this is going.

Shrewd marketers spot the gap in the market and exploit it.  The gap we are looking at is a creativity gap.  Whilst the majority continue to churn out low-rent social posts, the opportunity is there to be different, to stand out from the crowd.  To find a different way to engage with the audience.

Respect your audience

It really is that simple to express.  Stop treating your audience as though they have no choice.  They do and you need to change your ways if you are to keep their attention.  Fail to respond to market changes and you risk going the way of the dinosaurs, or the British motorcycle industry, or Blockbuster.  History is littered with examples and Darwin clearly expressed the reasons why.

It’s easy to criticise

Let’s face it, we all do it and we all do it quite a lot of the time.  We all sit in our comfortable armchairs passing critical judgements on people, generally who have far more talent and success than we have.  Think about the last sporting event you watched...

I am as guilty of this as anyone and I am writing this article as a way of redressing the balance somewhat.  

I hope.

To be more constructive

We have looked at the state of advertising, the Boomerang Curve and where problems may be lining up for us in the future.  Spotting the issue is one thing, how to avoid it is less obvious.

If you are reviewing your marketing strategy, the chances are you are considering the three basic questions that your audience will be asking:

1.     Who?

2.     What?

3.     Why?

(By the way, if you are not considering these fundamental questions, you really need to stop NOW and rethink)

Pretty simple stuff on the face of it but, if you cannot answer these questions satisfactorily and IN ORDER, you have a problem.  If you play Dungeons and Dragons, this sequential question and answer process should be second nature of course but, for the rest of us, well we probably have lives.

The first question ‘Who or, more completely, who are you?’ is becoming more challenging as media channels become flooded with low-grade, low-cost messaging and the resultant noise drowns out all but the biggest and loudest.  We have seen this time and time again (that pesky Boomerang Curve) and we can see it now, if we just pause for a moment and look at the market.

If you don’t have the budgets of a Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble or L’Oreal (yes you are worth it apparently) you need to maximise the impact of your communications, not just follow the herd and get lost in the general melee.

It’s clear that you need to capture your audience’s attention at this critical initial point if you are to take your target to the second question.  We will look more closely at how we address that issue later but, for now, I am sure you are keen to jump forward so, here is the second question:

 â€˜What do you have that may interest me?’

So, what do you have?  Do not underestimate this question.  The easy answer is, of course, your product or services.  Not good enough.  Your competition, by definition, offers similar products or services, so how do you differentiate yourself and build (or maintain) interest?

This is the tricky stage.  Actually, they are all tricky but this is the stage at which so many companies go straight to talking about themselves.  Like the party bore who can’t stop telling you about their new house/car/holiday/job/salary/conquest ad nauseam, this self-centred focus will rapidly alienate an audience and deliver them directly into the hands of your competition.  â€œExcuse me, I have just seen my old friend Bill come in, I must nip over and say hello”.  Used (or heard) this before?  You don’t actually know anyone called Bill do you.

If, instead, you consider the perspective of your audience and put yourself in their shoes, you should find that your offering provides a solution to a need or a problem.  Now you have something of interest and a reason to open the conversation.  

Engage with your audience and do it in a way that is different from everyone else.  Show that you care and understand.  Show that you can help.

But, and here is the key thought, you need to be able to prove you can deliver.  What you say must be true!  Get this wrong and you will never reach the third question.

Let’s assume you have captured attention, engaged delightfully, delivered your messages and are ready for the last hurdle.  â€˜Why should I believe what you say?’

You can’t relax yet.  You must convince your audience to do something and the mistake most often made is to tell the audience not show them.  You have seen it so many times.  Companies tend to talk about the fact that they are “the biggest, the best, the most experienced, the most successful etc” and it is totally meaningless.

If your audience response could be “well you would say that wouldn’t you” your message has failed.  You have not SHOWN them, you have TOLD them and you have lost your opportunity to communicate because, well you would say that wouldn’t you.

It’s a tortuous game.  At each stage there are many opportunities to get it wrong and drop the ball but, with the right strategy and creative approach, you can not only capture the attention of a prospect but also engage and lead them to a point of action.

So you can see it's neither rocket science nor brain surgery, but it does warrant serious thought if it is to be effective.

It’s a Big Question

It’s very easy to look back and analyse but, on its own, it doesn’t really help with the immediate problem.

However, it does inform a solution.  

First, let’s run through a few basics:

Who are we talking to?

• In this context, middle class, middle income to affluent, aspirational consumers between 18 and 60.  When we talk about “the public” or “the audience” this is primarily, but not exclusively, whom we’re describing

What advertising mechanism are we looking at?

• Raising brand/product awareness to new consumers
• Getting the consumer to purchase and engage asap (this is not simply brand awareness raising – call to action is a key component)

What is the problem?

As we have seen, advertising opportunities are drying up.  Big brands can still advertise because they can afford the media around big sporting/music/cultural events, and they can afford to sponsor them, so their name is visible every 15 seconds.  They can buy the market and lock out their competitors (e.g. Heineken 0% & Formula 1). 

These are the only real occasions that the audience will watch traditional broadcast TV because the audience is now paying for subscription television/music/gaming packages rather than engaging with advertiser supported media. 

When you subscribe to Disney +, you have access to Disney (The Muppets, Winnie the Pooh, Pirates of the Caribbean franchise), Lucas Film (Star Wars franchise, Indiana Jones), Marvel (Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, X-Men, Deadpool), Pixar (Toy Story etc), Fox (The Simpsons, Family Guy, 20th Century Fox Films), and ESPN.  And that’s just on one platform.  

If you don’t fancy that, you’ve got Apple TV + (with $1,000,000,000 development war chest), Netflix and Amazon Prime.  Plus many other subscription content channels that are springing up as the audience increases demand.

All of which are advert free!

It’s true that the audience may decide they don’t want any of that content, and what they really want to do is watch ITV or Dave. But… they probably won’t.

Because of these changes, social media channels are becoming inundated with brands large and small.  The adverts are generally poor quality, partly because the algorithms changed and good adverts aren’t allowed to spread organically as they once did, and partly because marketing department budgets are being forced downwards by finance directors with an eye on the bottom line and not the brand.  So the lowest bidder tends to win the work.

But, and this is key, when you pay for 20,000 sets of eyeballs you get 20,000 sets of eyeballs or even fewer.  That’s it. Furthermore you have no control whatsoever over the delivery channel.

It is starting to resemble the world of direct mail marketing more and more. (Everyone on the list gets one, almost everyone hates it, most of it gets ignored, over 99% of it goes in the bin, a tiny percentage take note). 

Except that not everyone gets a copy any more, unless you are prepared to outbid your competition.

The solution that brands are being given to overcome this?

Branded content.  For example, a chef doing fifty recipes with your brand as a key ingredient.  Or a journey across Britain in an electric car to make people think positively about a power company. 

This solution relies on one key and very disturbing supposition:

You behave as though your potential consumers are stupid.

Why would we say that?

Because advertisers and marketing departments seem to expect people, with instant and almost universal access to the finest choice and variety of content in all human history, to make the choice to watch infomercials. 

Thinly veiled, desperate sounding pitches on how you should buy this coffee because it can go in cocktails! Or Chillis! Or Crème Brulee!  And this is just one example.

Seriously?  When the finest recipes for cocktails, or chilli, or crème brulee from the greatest practitioners of those respective industries are available.  For free.  On the same platform. 

Why would anyone possibly believe that your potential consumer would do that?

The only explanation is that the people selling the idea believe that the audience is less intelligent, less savvy, and less aware than they are.   That the consumer is, in fact, stupid. 

Our answer? - Asymmetric Consumer Engagement – ACE

Why Asymmetric?

Historically, there has been an unspoken contract between the advertiser and the consumer.  The consumer wants content, but good quality content is expensive to produce and distribute.  The advertiser wants the consumer’s time and attention (and money), but the consumer does not like the idea of being ‘sold to’.

So, there is a two-way (symmetrical) contract.  The advertiser will pay for the content and delivery to the consumer and, in exchange, the consumer will ‘allow’ the advertiser to interrupt the content with communications about their brand and products.

When content was printed matter, the intrusion was minimal.  The consumer merely needed to turn a page to avoid the advert.  So the advert had to be eye-catching and interesting.  With television, the advert was more of an interruption but, because the delivered content was rich and of high quality (please note I am omitting reality TV from this point!) the consumer was prepared to watch the advert and, if they really wanted to avoid it, they could always go and make a cup of tea in the break.

So again, the adverts themselves had to be creative and interesting, the beginning of the “Creative Revolution”, if they were to be effective.

As the internet took over as the most promising channel for brand communications, the digital revolutionaries plunged headlong into advertising, thinking the same principle applied.  For while it was almost true.  But, as we have seen, not for long.

The ACE approach changes this.  Our approach is based on one, single philosophy:

“Respect your audience”  

This sounds like the standard marketing/advertising buzzword bingo has been an industry staple for years.  But this isn’t a fluffy public relations exercise. 

It’s a promise, but more importantly, it’s a warning. 

It could just as easily be reversed: 

“Don’t respect you audience and suffer the consequences”.

So, how do we make it work for you. How does it make money for you?

By overcoming another preconceived notion that is endemic in the industry.

The industry understands intellectually that the audience can avoid advertising messaging.  We all know that people can access the best content by paying and thus avoiding the adverts.

But in practice, the advertising industry has never understood this in reality.  Advertisers still act as though the audience doesn’t have a choice.

Which is, eventually what will kill advertising. 

Arrogance and an inability to adapt.  There are too many historic examples of this.  The British motorcycle industry, Blockbuster, Kodak and Yahoo all failed to see the ways in which attitudes and expectations were changing and spot the upstarts that would eventually take over their markets.

What can you do?

Accept that the audience won’t see your message even if it’s attached to a third party’s great content.

Instead?

We need to create content the audience actively chooses to watch, and share, and revisit, and put the sales messaging inside it. 

How is it done?

By understanding one simple fact.  The content doesn’t need to be about you.  It doesn’t need to be about your product.  It doesn’t need to be in the same area.  It just needs to appeal to the demographic who will buy your product, and it needs the messaging to help them do it. 

What does this do?

It unlocks everything.  It removes the restrictions on your content.  It means that the content is the hook, and because you control it, you can focus the content to your exact audience, depending on your engagement strategy and needs.  It can change and evolve as your marketing strategy changes and evolves, because unlike traditional sponsored media, you control the content.  You own the content the audience are coming to see. 

It is an advert. But an advert for a new world.

If it reaches your exact audience.  If it makes them engage.  If they seek it out and share it themselves.  If it gets press coverage that you don’t have to pay for, simply because people want to write about it.  If it sells your product.  It is an advert.

Who said your content had to be about you to sell your product? 

Based on the understanding that in the new reality, it is the customer who is in control.  Unless you have the budget of Diageo, or Ford, or Coca Cola, you must accept that the Consumer has all the power.  Therefore, you must work in a completely different way if you are ever going to try and get a fraction of that power back. 

You have been warned.

Look on this as the beginning of a new journey.  One that is going to add value to your marketing and brand strategies and give you that crucial differentiation from your competition.

We call the idea Asymmetric Consumer Engagement (ACE) because we recognise that the symmetry of the age-old unspoken contract between advertisers and consumers has been broken.  And it has been broken by the advertisers.

The most important lesson we have learned in our research is that you need to demonstrate respect for your audience.  You need to create content the audience actively chooses to watch, and share, and revisit, and allow that to be the vehicle for your sales messages.

Sounds obvious?  It’s easy to get it very badly wrong and end up back at square one, so here are some basic rules that you MUST follow if you are to succeed with this approach.

1.     The product cannot be the solution to a problem.  This will destroy trust and negate the process

2.     The product cannot simply be mentioned in an ‘ad break’.  This negates the purpose of ACE

3.     An aspect or aspects of the product can be used as the entry way into the narrative.  This introduction can be used as the conceit that drives the media

4.     The product must never be hidden.  The audience must never believe or feel that they have been tricked

You must then answer the following questions.  Again, if you miss these steps out, your project is on uncertain foundations.  Preparation is key.

·       What needs to be sold?

·       To whom are you selling?

·       What sort of media does your target audience consume and how?

o   By medium (video, audio etc)

o   By delivery mechanism (tablet, mobile, PC, TV)

o   By occasion (at work, at home, in the car, commute, evening, cooking, cleaning, shower, etc.)

o   By duration (sub 5 mins, sub 15 mins, sub 30 mins, sub 1 hour)

o   By binge watch (are they prepared to return, or will they consume everything in one sitting?)

o   Is this to be consumed alone or with others?

·       What genre(s) do they favour? (Drama, entertainment, lifestyle, health and fitness, wellness, comedy etc.)

At this point in the process you will have a profile of the audience, the content, the genre, the runtime, perhaps the number of episodes to release, the format.  All of which inform the creative approach.  

None of this is rocket science (or brain surgery), but it does take care, attention to detail, skill and creativity to make it work.  If any one of these elements is lacking, the strategy will not deliver the results you expect and want.

Which is where we come in of course.  I respect my audience and you know as well as I do that people post on LinkedIn as a business development exercise.  I am no different.

But we do have something new and, especially in these disrupted times, maybe something new is what you need.

And that was where this article, and in fact, this whole series of articles was going to end.  On a positive note about the importance of change and the excitement of a new opportunity. 

But… And in life there is, sadly, always a but…

There are two ways of looking at ACE.

The first is, as I mentioned a positive opportunity.

The second? The second is a warning. 

In the past 15 years the marketing and advertising industries have always asked “Can we?”.  How much data can we scrape from consumers?  How much screen real estate can we take over on their pc screen?  How long can we force people to watch our message before they’re allowed to skip? How intrusive can we be before there is a push back?

We forgot to ask the thing that really mattered.  We focused so much on “Can we?”, that we forgot to ask, “Should we?”

The “Can we?” culture is short-termist.  The “Can we?” culture brings quick profit, but often with long term pain and loss.  How poorly can we treat livestock before the meat becomes dangerous? How cheaply can we make the clothing before we put garment workers across the world in real danger?  How distant/mechanical/unhelpful can we make our customer service before the consumers have had enough?  How much money can we make by packaging sub-prime debt with AAA rated debt before we crash the world economy?

“Can we?” kills industries. “Can we?” is a drug that gives you highs but can prove almost impossible to let go of until it is too late. 

We believe in ethical business.  Not in a fluffy, PR-able sort of way, and not in a mental “we’re going to glue ourselves to your front door unless you do exactly what we demand” sort of way.  But by believing that this process should be of mutual benefit to all concerned.  

That nobody should end up being the patsy. 

If you believe in “Should we?” – if you believe that respect and profit aren’t mutually exclusive.  If you believe that giving something to get something back is a good way of working then it is time for change.

There is definitely a feeling of “it won’t happen to us” in the advertising market.  I am talking about the tidal wave of advertising content that is flooding media channels, the effect it is having on the audience and the fact that advertisers are not adapting their behaviour in line with fairly clear audience responses.

There is plenty of evidence to show the audience is not happy.

The use of ad-blockers on web-browsers has grown rapidly (the developer of ad blocking app Crystal took $75,000 in its first week of release) and for a wide number of reasons:

Close to 50% of the audience already considers there are too many adverts and they are too intrusive and/or annoying.  Does this tell us something?  For advertisers to continue along this path is like saying “I don’t care what you want, you are going to listen to me” to the target audience.  This cannot be a good thing, especially as the audience now has so much control over media channels and, perhaps more importantly, a global voice.

Kantar, the data, insights and consulting company has recently published a report revealing that social media is the least trusted channel of communication in the UK, while print and broadcast media rank most highly.  The report also finds that social media and advertising are the two least trusted sources of information on products and brands.

According to Kantar’s DIMENSION study, which is now in its fourth year, concern over privacy has led to widespread mistrust in advertising, with 58 per cent of UK-based connected consumers in the UK stating they are concerned that more tailored content might compromise their privacy and only 43 per cent saying they prefer to see ads that are relevant to their interests and needs.

It's Ancient History surely?

Indeed, none of this is new.  Excessive tele-sales led to the creation of the TPS ‘do not call' list, spam email led to spam filters, banners led to banner-blockers and now ads have ad-blockers.  As Hegel somewhat paradoxically said, “the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history”.  And we clearly have not learned.

So where are we now?

Many web-based businesses rely on advertising revenue to survive.  Advertising, in all its forms, is a business necessity especially now we can all access global markets.  How are prospects on the other side of the world going to hear about our products if we don’t communicate?

We sidestep ad-blockers by relying on the fact that they don’t affect advertising on social media and other apps, and we flood them with adverts.  We insist that website visitors disable ad-blockers before we allow access to content.  But are we missing the point?

We clearly have a quandary.  The volume, generally poor quality and intrusive nature of on-line adverts has turned the audience against the advertisers to the point that they will pay to stop seeing them, but advertising is essential for the economic survival of a huge number of companies.

So, is circumventing ad blockers and relying on apps the answer?  It may keep the advertisers happy, but this approach is a symptomatic treatment.  It’s like taking paracetamol for a headache.  It does not address the underlying cause and a headache is sometimes an indicator of something more serious.

What is the underlying cause? 

The root of the problem is that advertisers have broken the ‘contract’ they had with the audience by bombarding them with low-quality content via digital channels and giving nothing in return for their attention.  Spam for a new generation.  It’s easy to see why, of course.  As budgets are squeezed, the costs of digital advertising look very attractive, but it’s short-termism.  

As in medicine, it is better to treat the cause than the symptoms.

There have been attempts of course, operating under a variety of names such as ‘native advertising’ and all aimed at blending in with the user experience.  But this approach brings with it some serious issues of trust with the consumer.  

Native advertising relies on the difficulty in distinguishing between ‘genuine’ and promotional content.  It’s a risky manoeuvre.  It relies on an assumption that the audience is not very bright and will not notice as we ‘sneak in’ adverts. (A study by IAB concluded that half of viewers could not tell the difference between native ads and actual news … advertisers are banking on consumers being too unintelligent to know otherwise)

It’s a lethal assumption.  Not only have advertisers broken the symmetrical contract with the audience, they now risk breaking the trust contract and, in the process, they will lose the ability to communicate with the audience.

Mark Inskip, CEO Kantar UK & Ireland, Media Division, recently said: â€œNow, more than ever is the time for the advertising and media industries to work together to rebuild consumer trust…”

I’m not blaming the technology.  I’m blaming the way it is being used.  Remember.

The audience is not only bright, it is savvy and can spot a fake a mile away.  Once spotted, that fake will be held to account on-line with potentially disastrous results for the brand.  Trust, once lost, can take years of hard work to rebuild.  Prevention is definitely better than cure!

It’s not all doom and gloom of course, there is an answer

We have developed an approach that we call Asymmetric Consumer Engagement, or ‘ACE’ (convenient eh! well we are an advertising agency).  If you don’t want to read the previous 21 pages, please have a look at our website https://strawman.agency/a-c-e

We believe that there is room for advertising, as long as we return to the premise that we treat our audience with respect and honesty.

This is key and something that has been forgotten in the digital stampede.

Thank you again for reading and I hope you found it both useful and entertaining.

David Acton

david.acton@strawman.agency