By now there’s nobody in your circle who doesn’t use the internet, very few who don’t use it heavily – and hardly anyone who remembers seeing any of the ads!
This is a blind spot: first, in the literal sense of missing the ad from an audience POV and second, in the current conversations on Digital from the industry standpoint. Because this quite pervasive if ‘layman’ observation is given a wide miss in all the shouting that is on at the moment. Or at most, it’s covered under the ‘you-only-pay-for-what-you-get’ umbrella.
What prompted this post was the latest “never notice them” I got at a party recently when I was speaking about the Digital revolution in our industry. I’ve heard a lot of this by now and from a diverse range of people (though regular internet users all). But this one from a very digitally clued-on, gadget-and-games loving Investment Banker in his early 30’s was what really spurred it. It was time to look it from an outsider / ‘layman’s perspective. (To paraphrase David Ogilvy : the ‘layman’ is not a moron , he’s your target audience !)
Ceteris paribus, ad avoidance is the norm: you avoid ads when you can. It holds true across media. For e.g, there’s a roughly 30% drop on average in TV audience during ad breaks. The difference though comes from the way media consumption plays out in each case. Two important elements of the process rarely get factored into the current conversation about Digital – namely, audience state of mind and communication format.
The constraint of online formats is easier to understand: the static banner occupying 1/10th of a cluttered screen, or that pre-roll TVC playing on a little window with low wattage laptop speakers on. That straight away puts a limit to impact and recall.
But audience state of mind when consuming media is as big a point. Audience passivity is underrated. It’s actually one of the most valuable things there is in this line. It renders the remaining 70% (or 50%, or 25%, if you prefer…) of the TV audience who stayed with the ad break pretty much captive. The guy takes what’s coming on the screen.
With online, there’s a more active sense of purpose. The natural consequence of that are things like closing that Pop Up box when logging into E-Mail or completely ignoring the ads when updating your Facebook status or relying only on the unpaid-for Google Search results when hunting for information. It’s the flip side of interactivity and choice.
Combine the two elements and you size up that blind spot pretty well. It’s where that guy at the party was coming from. In a nutshell, your audience is more actively focused on something else and what you’re trying to distract them with is just not powerful enough to either distract them at all or to distract them enough.*
The internet (and the digital revolution in general) is one the most profound developments in human history. It’s a game changer. To labor on that point would be a banality. Its impact on business has been colossal. It has impacted the business of marketing communications.
But my hunch is that the impact on communicating to consumers online and changing / shaping their attitudes and behaviors – big as it is, hasten to add – is not as big or to the same extent. It’s more ‘incremental’. (see a previous post on this). There is a difference between consumers’ consumption / adoption of the digital life and their consumption of digital advertising as it stands now.
Operative word being ‘as it stands now’. Because the true power of ‘Digital’ will be unleashed the day rich content (read full-on video) is delivered on a mass scale, economically and without a technical glitch in a big , easy to operate , switch on-off box (read TV set or tablet device ) to consumers in a lean back / passive mode. The power lies in its becoming more an all-pervasive distribution technology than remaining a ‘medium’. And that day is coming. No doubt about it.
Cheers
* PS :
Metrics like CTR (3%? 9%? 15 %?) or Facebook ‘Likes’ (25 million for the Coca Cola page, or 5% of the total FB universe , or 1% of the brand’s consumer universe) could bear all this out but that’d be straying from the point of this post of seeing it from the layman’s POV.
In our region compared to more advanced markets , a lower audience base could be seen as an issue as well. (click here for internet penetration stats). But : a.) that’s not the point of this post. We’re talking about current internet users and b.) the base will only grow – and grow fast.
