Advertising has reached a new level of pain for many consumers. The mobile experience alone is full of borderline invasive pieces that cover your entire screen or obfuscate the button to close out an ad. Users are being forced to watch sponsored content before streaming videos and video games. Does any of this sound productive?
Think about the last time you watched the rest of a pre-roll commercial on YouTube after the five-second “Skip Ad” button is activated. Advertising is becoming desperate, and that desperation is being taken out on customers. It’s time for us all to start trading intrusion for invitation.
Millennials hate advertising with a passion, responding poorly to targeted and other traditional forms of advertising. However, according to ad tech company Unruly, millennials are 112% more inclined than other demographics to share ads that they like online and 23% more likely to enjoy ads they find relevant. The study is vast and the key finding is clear: Millennials want something that engages with them and makes them feel something, even if it’s something that’s getting them to buy or try something. They don’t want to be advertised to; they want you to engage with them.
BuzzFeed has done a great job in creating engaging content (versus tricking users into viewing it) for brands like Friskies. Its Dear Kitten series has racked up over 50 million views alone. Why? Because it's funny, enjoyable and just happens to be made for Friskies. There’s no deception either — it's a genuinely funny series that people watched and shared with millions of their friends because it added value to their day.
Native content doesn’t have to be high-budget either. The Great Britain Tourist Board’s sponsored BuzzFeed post, 10 British Festivals That Are So Weird They're Really Quite Wonderful, is transparently marked as sponsored content yet reads like a regular BuzzFeed post about weird things you can do in Britain. The reader is certainly being advertised to but they’re being entertained and treated like a regular person, not a piece of meat. Giving users the power to choose and enjoy what they want is key.
Instead of just airing a commercial, Etihad Airways created a VR experience for their new A380 planes with Nicole Kidman that anyone with an iPhone and Google Cardboard could pick up and immerse themselves in. The Green Bay Packers collaborated with Giphy to create a series of gifs of their players for fans to share, transparently inserting a brand into the normal conversations that people have by providing actual value.
If that’s not enough to move you, perhaps the future will. Generation Z — the new demographic of 16-19-year-olds that advertisers are justifiably terrified of — is catastrophically anti-advertising, with a study reporting that the only thing they disliked as much as mobile advertisements were ads on the radio.
In fact, only 21% of Gen Z respondents responded positively to mobile video advertising, despite being predominantly on mobile devices, and only 22% of Gen Z respondents viewed mobile display advertising positively. As time rolls on and the buying power of Gen Z grows, we’re likely to see the darkest timeline emerge for those stuck in the past of forced video content and brute-force display advertising.
In advertising and marketing, the term “consumer” is said about once every three seconds, yet we’ve forgotten to give them something to consume. If there’s no value in the ad, what value is there in the product?
So when you put together your next campaign, stop thinking about how you can “just get the user to click” and how you can make them want to. Great technology will power connections, but in the end, it’s the people who matter most.
