To Stand Out Against Bad Ads the Key Is Not to Be Louder, It’s to Change The Argument

I am a skeptical consumer, and I hate ads. I zoom past them on Facebook and abandon articles that feel too ad heavy. I’m not alone. In fact, 26% of the population uses an ad blocker, including other marketers.

Which I am sure I knew but I hadn’t given much thought to until I was in a room full of digital marketers from the Mid Atlantic who all had their hands raised when asked the question “who uses an ad blocker.” This means upwards of a quarter of paid advertising efforts will never reach their audience, including this particular audience full of the very people who are responsible for creating the messages they’re blocking.

The point I’m trying to make is not that marketers shouldn’t use ad blockers. Rather, that something is really wrong with advertising if the very people who work tirelessly to create these messages are the same people blocking other people’s tireless work. It all boils down to the fact that there is too much bad marketing.

While at the Digital Summit in Philly last week I learned some scary facts:

• In 1984, the average person saw 2,000 ads a day. In 2014, that number grew to 5,000. Yet, the average person only remembers 12 of those ads.
• In 2015, branded content creation rose to 35% but engagement decreased by 17%.
• It takes 7 touch points before we take action.

That means that after all of your hard work, there’s a tiny likelihood that someone will see your ad and an even smaller chance that they will remember it, or take action. Again, I don’t say this to be discouraging. I say it to get to the main takeaway from my time at last week’s conference:

We don’t need to add to the bad marketing. We need to work that much harder to create good marketing. There’s such a small window of opportunity to get our message out to consumers, so we better make it a great one!

It sounds like an ‘easier said than done’ scenario. It may be for some, but everything that I learned last week really drove home what we are doing here at 3Seed and what keeps our clients coming back and our referral traffic rising. At 3Seed, we are really good at thinking about the customer more than the channel, the message more than the medium.

We know that in order to make content effective in a world overrun by content you need to tell a story that is compelling, that triggers a response, and that is speaking to the right audience. So when you are able to get in front of the customer, they take action.

Want to learn more about how 3Seed is changing the argument of advertising and how we can help you craft compelling digital marketing that works? Drop us a line.