We have seen the average click -through rates on digital banners decreasing by more than 60% in the past ten years, and ever more declining day-after recall rates for TV advertising. Numerous sources on Google estimate that the average consumer is exposed to anything from 3000 to 5000 commercial messages – per day.
And what do we as consumers do when we are bombarded with brands constantly shouting at us to ‘buy now’, ‘pick me’, ‘new and improved’, ‘switch and save’? We tune out. We switch off. That is why banner blindness online is a real thing. We ignore ads to the point where we don’t even see them anymore. Billboards become wallpaper.
I used to have a client in downtown Johannesburg and so I used to drive from Rivonia, along the M1 freeway, to the Johannesburg CBD at least three times a week. There are in excess of 600 billboards and street poles (I know because I have counted) along that 20km stretch of road. How many brands do I recall from having driven that route so often? One. A Superga shoe ad. And the only reason I remember it is because instead of a traditional billboard, they built an enormous shoe next to Melrose Arch. That stood out, and I still remember it five years later - every time I step into a shoe shop, I take note of (and sometimes even buy) the Superga brand.
So what are brands to do? Marketers are paying good money to get people to see their ads and can’t afford to have consumers ignoring them. One way is to buy the consumers attention, for example, FNB with their Steve radio campaign. They became the biggest spenders on radio and bought so much frequency that you couldn’t turn the radio on without hearing at least two Steve ads. But, unfortunately, many brands just don’t have the luxury of doing a Steve.
The truth of the matter is that you can have the best media plan, talking to exactly the right person, at the right time, but if the message you put in from of them doesn’t speak to the person in a personal, entertaining, engaging and relevant way, it all comes to nought.
Today’s marketing paradigm is all about content. Brands can no longer afford to just be advertisers, shouting at consumers. They need to start seeing themselves as content producers; creating content that engages with consumers, relevantly. If we want the consumer to give up his precious time to pay attention to us, we need to reward him for that time – we need to entertain him. We need to tell him something that will change his life. In a nutshell, we need to become the thing that he is interested in.
Good, relevant, meaningful content is crucial if you wish to make a connection with your consumer. Why do people love Nandos ads? Because they are funny, they are engaging, they challenge the convention – they entertain us. And we will talk about them – months, and sometimes even years, after they have flighted.
In 2013, a Vietnamese developer, Nguyen Ha Dong, created a game for iOS and Android called Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird was a game where you navigated a little bird across your cellphone screen, dodging objects by tapping on the screen. The faster you tapped, the higher the bird flew allowing you to fly over trees and buildings. The slower you tapped, the lower he flew, enabling you to navigate under clouds. This game became an overnight phenomenon.
By January 2014, it reached number one on the App Store in over 50 different countries. It was downloaded more than 50 million times. It was tweeted about nearly 16 million times. It spawned countless clones, and at the height of its success, Flappy Bird was generating over $50 000 of advertising revenue per day.
Then on the 10th of February, Nguyen decided to pull the game from the App Store due to guilt over what he considered to be its addictive nature. Some people who had already downloaded the game onto their iPhones were selling them on eBay for $1500 or more.
So what does this tell us? It tells that good content is defined by the consumer, and they will engage with stuff that they find adds value to their lives. All good content has three things in common - it is relevant, it is engaging, it is entertaining.
It is our job as advertisers and marketers to understand our consumers, to use insights to drive real decisions, to give our consumers what they want. The time of shouting at consumers is over. The time to engage with them has arrived.
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