On Human Centered Advertising and Why You Need It Right Now

In the early years of my media planning, one of the coolest 'tricks' to do with an online campaign was to use behavioral targeting. Browsing history stored in cookie files was an ultimate treasury of users' needs and wishes, as it would allow to serve ads that were supposedly better adjusted to their interests and therefore -  prove more clickable.

Today, there are plenty of ways in which ads are planned to maximize reach and clicks, but a great deal of them also ends up becoming a more or less sophisticated sucker-punch.

Example: would I be inclined to click a banner of a car brand given the fact that I've been browsing automotive sites for a month and I follow them on Facebook? Probably. Would it respond to my needs? I'd hope so. Did I agree to see it? I did, at least technically, since I had agreed to the cookie policy of a website I was on. But did I want to see the banner in the first place? Almost definitely not.

Back in the old days, I didn't use ad blocking software so I could keep track of what's new in the fascinating world of online advertising. I do now, after just too many unskippable videos that cannot be unseen, too many mistargeted banners, too many unthoughtfully remarketed products I had already bought. I'm not the only one - with me, nearly 35% of Polish and well over 10% of Europe's online users use ad blockers, as PageFair's report shows. In Poland, that’s 8 million people.

One of my lecturers at university used to say that the central problem for marketing is how to deliver the highest value to the consumer. Truth is, most of advertising we are exposed to is faking value with loads of marketing BS and no one ever questions the purpose so long the campaign targets are met.

Consumer insights are too often substituted with 'reasons to believe'

But today’s young generations of Y and Z - internet savvy yet banner-blind - are able to smell BS from a mile and then just go away. So, advertising like in the good ol' 00s? Awkward. Not that I’m making a big discovery here, but the answer to the question ‘why adblocking’ is plain and simple:

People do not want irrelevant information. They want information that serves their needs and improves their utility. 

If they want to buy insurance, they go to a quote comparison website and select the optimal offer. If they want entertainment, they go to Netflix. But if they wanted to be bombed with advertising content, they could just be watching TV shopping channel all day long (which in Poland, by the way, has 0,01% share in viewership and equals roughly 3600 people, according to Nielsen Audience Measurement).

Sure, if KPIs will be met then let's throw some more commercials at the consumer and watch how ad frequency does its job, eventually making him subconsciously choose our product over competition. But how much money will be lost at the same time to ads that no one sees and that are just not convincing enough? Too much, every time.

In design thinking framework or UX design, on the other hand, it's all about the users.

It's about knowing who they are, how they would interact with the product and acknowledging their needs, abilities and limitations. The core objective is to design a better product - so it would be used with satisfaction.

Going a little deeper, there is this jobs-to-be-done approach, where consumers actually hire products and services to help them do their jobs or activities. So, if my job is to be entertained, I go to Netflix, but if my job is to save on a trip to Italy, Wizz Air tickets are just the solution.

By the same token, marketers and agencies need to create meaningful and purpose-driven advertising to make it valuable to the consumer. Questions such as: "would the target audience use the ad to fulfill their needs? how?" are necessary to create a meaningful message that consumers would want to interact with - so it would help them in their activities.

Yet, one has to bear in mind that the most troublesome factor of iteration-based design thinking approach to advertising is time. Most communication is planned and bought in time-spans too short to question the reason behind using a certain creative. We should. We will have to learn from agile startups that iterate for a living - so we can eventually reach an optimal solution for us and the consumer.

Also worth remembering is the fact that there needs not to be any farfetched supposition that consumers' job is to buy the product, because it's not. Marketers should keep people (not users) from overrated and dull marketing techniques and use advertising to deliver actual quality to their lives. It will pay back soon enough.

Dominik Komar is Head of Innovation Lab, part of Havas Media Group. Constantly following the convergence of offline and online world.