According to a recent article in Marketing Week, ‘Traditional still trumps “annoying” Digital advertising.
Adobe’s “Click Here: State of Online Advertising” study has discovered that consumers still prefer ‘old school’ channels (print, TV, outdoor etc) to the new digital and social channels.
Words such as ‘annoying’, ‘invasive’ and distractive are some of the less flattering adjectives used to to describe the online efforts so widely adopted by consumer brands. Probably not the impact hoped for.
Interestingly – print magazines (the dying medium?) were voted the most popular advertising medium (39% of the poll) with TV ads coming in second at 23%.
7 out of 10 consumers said that they thought TV ads were more important than online ads. Proving that a seismic shift away from traditional television has not exactly happened and probably unlikely to do so in the near future.
So what is it exactly that people don’t like? Digital after all gives advertisers the opportunity to tailor adverts and subsequently broadcast to a specific audience. Digital allows brands to be much more personal and relevant to consumers by appearing at the right time to the right people…. the holy grail?
The thing is, we are not all living in a brand driven, bovine world where we just see stuff and ‘buy’.
Consumers still have emotions and dreams. We want to feel inspired by the world round us and importantly – we want to feel something.
Digital and social media certainly make sense from an investment point of view. You can easily track where your spend is going, how many impressions, clicks, shares and tweets you have achieved and how this compares to other channels.
But if the bulk of your audience is just getting annoyed with you, what are you actually achieving long-term?
When we are inspired, we remember and we talk about that experience. In the world of traditional advertising, people still cite the Guinness ‘Surfer’ adverts from 1999 as one of the most memorable campaigns ever.
More than a decade later – people still remember campaigns like these and for all of the right reasons.
When you look back at your own life and what has inspired you over the years. How much of that inspiration happened online?
The reality is that people remember personal experiences over pretty much anything else. It is experience that truly shapes who we are as individuals and how we see the world at large.
The most memorable experiences are those that inspire us. WOW moments that create emotions which resonate long after the event has taken place. Experiences that make use of all our senses and make us feel alive.
If brands want to inspire their audiences, they need to think about their audience as ‘people’ not just numbers. When the ultimate aim of a campaign is reach instead of inspiration, consumers know full well what your objectives are.
The online world allows consumers to easily switch off whenever they please. Brands need to take heed of this and re-focus energies and investments around quality engagements with their audience.
Cheap digital engagements are like a bad chat up line – if you ask it enough times, you may eventually get a response. But everybody in the room can see what you are up to and if you are not careful – you may get a reputation!
Hotcow is a multi-award winning, Experiential Marketing agency that deliver 50% more ROI, than clients would receive from any other brand experience agency. We accomplish this through our ‘R.A.R.E Advantage’ platform. For more information about R.A.R.E and how it can transform your marketing impact, contact us.
