Occasionally, I participate in those online consumer surveys, you know, the ones that show up in your email exclaiming “We Need Your Help!” I suppose taking part is just another absurdist attempt to prove my existence to myself, but you do learn a good deal about what worries the various companies. Nothing gives its hand away as quickly as a consumer survey, such as when Holiday Inn asks me whether I think of Comfort or Value first when I think of their hotel. Of course, Neither is not an option. Next question, please!
Lately, I’ve noticed several surveys addressing internet advertising. Last month, The Economist ran a long article on internet advertising, claiming that the internet is revolutionizing advertising as follows:
“A bevy of entrepreneurial firms—from Google, the world’s most valuable online advertising agency disguised as a web-search engine, to tiny Silicon Valley upstarts, many of them only months old—are now selling advertisers new tools to reduce waste. These come in many exotic forms, but they have one thing in common: a desire to replace the old approach to advertising, in which advertisers pay for the privilege of ‘exposing’ a theoretical audience to their message, with one in which advertisers pay only for real and measurable actions by consumers, such as clicking on a web link, sharing a video, placing a call, printing a coupon or buying something.”
If this is true, what the aforementioned consumer surveys reveal is that the power of the internet as a commercial tool is not sinking into the broader corporate world. The surveys that I have seen tend to measure ‘analog’ features of online advertising, things that you typically measure in the print world. I’m asked over and over again how many times I’ve seen an ad campaign; I’m asked how many times I’ve seen a competitor’s campaign; I’m asked to match taglines to products.
And then, of course, the mere fact that I’m being asked at all demonstrates a lot about the collective wisdom of the survey’s approach. I’m a curmudgeonly thirtysomething living across from Manhattan who doesn’t own a car or a house and who is single—what the hell do I know about the baby-food industry?
In the bad old days of advertising, these questions would be excusable, mostly because they were the only means by which one could assess the value of an ad campaign, but The Economist does an excellent job explaining why online advertising is gobbling up a larger share of the ad industry—advertisers no longer need to live in a world of random samples. The article quotes Greg Stuart, a trade association exec, in claiming that as much as $220 billion in ad expenditures per year is wasted. If true, that represents slightly more than half of the revenue generated worldwide by advertising agencies last year. Online technologies, such as click-through ads, offer up an ability to cut into these losses, but as the consumer-survey methodology above points out, too many marketing folks are stuck in the analog world, using their online ad budgets to create little more than digitized print campaigns.
After taking several recent consumer surveys regarding online advertising, one thing I noticed is how oblivious I am to the ‘traditional’ ads online. I could identify hardly any of the campaigns; I mismatched corporate spokespersons, and in some cases, couldn’t even match the product with its industry. In short, it dawned on me that I had developed quite a fine ad blocker, sans software. I had reached a point of ad immunity.
But am I really immune? Last month’s 100-plus-degree weather in the New York area finally broke down my resistance to purchasing an air conditioner. The first thing I did was type “air conditioner” into Google, and voila! All the ACs one could hope to purchase, links to stores, manufacturers, &tc. And yes, the search-engine text ads along the top and side of the page were very helpful. Next, I logged into my ConsumerReports.org account to compare models, and a few days later I was being cooled to my heart’s content by a Kenmore Plasmaire. For all I know, I might have come into contact with a dozen or more advertisements for ACs in the past month—and had remembered none of them. When it was time to make a purchase, I started with a blank slate. The Economist puts it this way:
“The kids in ‘Generation Y’, ‘echo-boomers’ and ‘millennials’—young people who tend to be adept at using media, constantly online and sceptical—are increasingly immune to the clichés of prime-time television and radio and mentally tune out these nuisances. Online, however, they may accept advertising, if it is unobtrusive, relevant and fun. Insofar as they took some action to invite the advertisement, they may even find it useful.”
Of course, I’m no kid, but the same logic holds, with the operative word being relevant. The key to ad immunity is not that consumers have become media zombies, insensate to every sight and sound thrust in front of them, but depends instead upon a concept that I would call ‘task interruption’. When folks are searching through The New York Times archives, writing an email, watching a TV program (or more likely, eating dinner, doing the dishes, and putting out the trash while watching a TV program), they have programmed themselves to filter out stimuli irrelevant to the task. I don’t stop to consider if my broker is doing a fine job when whoofing down my evening chicken parm, nor am I going to interrupt reading a news article to check out the great savings at Big Box, Inc. Time is valuable, everyone would agree, except, it seems, advertisers.
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