Let’s get back to basics – to look at our industry and ask the honest question: What’s really broken?
Afamiliar situation. The creative brief goes out: “We want banners that catch attention, interactive, engaging, noticeable, want a better brand recall, big formats, expandables, mid-page, homepage takeovers that no one can ignore (etc).”
The media brief goes out: “We want click through rates, unique in-target viewable impressions, views, clicks, reach, return on investment. We want to be seen everywhere where our customers and prospective customers are.”
The campaign results come in: 1.65 per cent CTR (“very good indeed”); 25 per cent vire through rate – (“wow”); 0.009 per cent view through conversion (“GREAT”).
What are we missing from the situation above? I think we should be asking: what percentage of people we alienated along the way and what short, and long-term, impacts will it have on my business?
INTRUSION, DISRUPTION AND OBSTRUCTION
Imagine you go to Amazon.com and you can only see four and five-star ratings and reviews. Would that give you accurate feedback about the product you want to buy? Clearly some people like the product but what about those who don’t? Would you not want to know about the flaws of the product too? I imagine even the vendor and also the manufacturer would like to receive this feedback so that they can address the issues, and improve their product.
Now, this is where the problem lies with online advertising in general. Most of the time we only focus on what’s working and we don’t think about fixing what’s broken. It’s a young industry, I know, and we are continually improving. However, I want to step back a little and highlight the biggest fundamental problem with online advertising, which is still based on the same old principles of intrusion, disruption and obstruction (IDO to save time). We rarely, or never, question who we might have annoyed, disrupted or even alienated with our advertisements. Perhaps if we were not too much in their face, jumping up and down desperately seeking attention, we could have persuaded more people to consider our products or services. Imagine if you could quantify it and attach won/lost sales on the back of that. Straightaway that would become an integral part of our key performance figures.
FOR EVERY ACTION, THERE’S AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION
Most of you have probably heard of the action versus reaction argument that stems from social psychology. At its most basic level, it simply means that our response is usually directed towards gaining back control. All too familiar situations: you want to watch a video online and are forced to watch an ad – 80 to 90 per cent of the time if you get a chance, you skip; you visit a news site and an expandable ad blocks the content – 98 to 99 per cent of the time you click on ‘X’ immediately; you go to a site that’s covered with ads and, without thinking, you block them out – a typical case of advertising avoidance, also known as ‘ad blindness’. Our reaction to IDOs is gaining back control and the dangerous part is that we’re doing it subconsciously most of the time. We’ve trained ourselves to avoid what is irritating and intrusive.
Advertising clutter is the product of IDO too. In a research paper, F. Rejon-Guardia et al concluded that intrusiveness is the main component of perceived advertising clutter. Clutter or noise, as we know, is one of our biggest enemies in advertising. Rejon-Guardia suggests that “advertising clutter can prompt undesired behaviours (e.g. advertising avoidance) as well as attitudes contrary to those that companies’ advertising campaigns hope to achieve. It also leads to diminished advertising efficacy in terms of consumer memory, a decrease in positive attitudes towards the message and brand, as well as declined purchasing intention and, therefore, sales”.[1]
PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE
There are some websites that do show signs of progress. They understand the power of listening to people and getting feedback – Facebook is one of them. Perhaps because they invented a platform where people have conversations an display opinions, therefore allowing people to give feedback comes naturally to them.
With Facebook ads for instance, if you click the ‘x’ button at the top-right of the ad unit, you are given options. If you choose ‘hide advert’ you currently get eight of them. The feedback you provide here gets fed back to the advertiser in the form of an ‘Ad Relevancy Score’ that will impact your cost per reach.
Google search is also a success story. Although there’s no feedback option, the ads are not intrusive as they blend in well with the rest of the search results and are highly relevant due to Google’s Quality Score algorithm.
STILL NOT ENOUGH
I feel that we need to measure the effects of IDO to understand its impact on the business. We need a new key performance indicator to both measure and elicit a score for ‘intrusiveness’. Just as brand marketers have turned to brand safety feedback in the past, the ‘intrusiveness’ factor will play a vital role in understanding how far our advertising is truly affecting the overall experience. In the face of the increasing effects of ad-blocking, this must be measured even more today than ever before. And this is something that both publishers and the media buyers will have to come together on.
Perhaps the next step should be to build the infrastructure that supports getting feedback and channels them back to our campaigns. Share your views on this with us @MediacomMENA.
Daniel Vaczi is regional head of digital at MediaCom MENA
