Are ads even useful anymore?
The dangers of building hype without substance.
By Ilsmarie Presilia — October 15th, 2021
Listen to the audio version here.
Hi there, The Ponder Lab here, with the mission to help you understand how people behave and react to brands and design. Today’s topic covers, although controversial, whether ads are even effective, especially with the ever-increasing amount we see nowadays.
Have you ever seen an ad and wondered how many others you have come across in a day?
Seriously, how many ads do you think we are exposed to in our day-to-day? And how many can you recall?
Seeing that despite circumstances the United States was dealing with in the 1970s that the average American was still exposed to approximately 500 to 1600 ads in a day, I was curious to figure out how much that might be five decades later. I wasn’t just curious; after researching and finding quite outdated numbers — 5000 ads a day in the early 2000s — I have tasked myself with the challenge to count them for myself. I knew that today we have more mediums that we use throughout our day and that overall, we spend more time interacting with them (5.2 hours in 1945 to 9.8 hours back in 2014). “So, I wondered, by how much has the number multiplied compared to the 70s? By five, six, seven even?”
Despite trying many times, I have failed miserably. See, back in the spring of 2006, when Yankelovich, a market research firm, was conducting research, half of those surveyed were already complaining that marketing and advertising were getting out of hand. I blame my failure on that very reason — marketing and advertising did get out of hand a long time ago, but by how much I couldn’t have anticipated. One of the main struggles I’ve faced was difficulty noticing ads in the first place.
It’s not so much the surprising issue Graham Charlton describes where close to 50% of surveyed adults did not know that the top results on Google’s search results were ads, but an underlying issue I will get into later. Despite Google’s frequent experiments, many of us know and recognise search engine- and other more obvious forms of ads. But what about subtler ones?
Luckily where I failed, others were more successful and estimated that the number was up to 10000 ads a day some six years ago. If like me, and most other people, that sounds insane to you, just take a closer look at this article up until this point. You have only been reading for a few minutes, but my need to avoid plagiarism has allowed me to expose you to a more subtle kind of advertisement.
See, advertisements unlike commonly thought, aren’t just paid announcements to increase sales and profits. Ads are defined as “the action of making generally known; a calling to the attention of the public” by Dictionary.com, and “a public promotion of some product or service” by PowerThesaurus.org. In other words, ads can be unpaid — known as organic advertising — but can include outside of that any sort of brand exposure you get in a day as well. Think of all the different physical labels and packaging you’d encounter without even leaving your home. And that’s only offline.
Every time you are prompted to consider or recall a brand and what it offers, it’s advertising — even if you already made a purchase. Why? Because that’s how brands and the Attention Economy works. They constantly call for your attention — the precious resource everything and everyone is fighting for.
Consider what I have mentioned about brands in the previous articles; they are perceptions formed due to a presence or lack of consistency propelling us to take a specific action or not, depending on how we feel. I also mentioned that that puts us, consumers, in a peculiar place. Perception is ours, meaning that instead of organisations owning their brands, we do. The problem with this is that our perceptions aren’t as much ours as we’d imagine. Branding is known as the act through which businesses can nudge perceptions to coherence. This can be done truthfully or untruthfully. However, most of the time, the latter isn’t done intentionally — it’s a result of embracing marketing and ignoring branding altogether. From my previous content, I believe it to be evident what my opinion on untruthfulness is, but if it’s not clear, I don’t recommend it.
No, you don’t need a rebrand; your ads simply don’t connect.
Despite being a multibillion-dollar industry, several numbers show that people find ads annoying. For example, a study conducted in late 2016 and early 2017 by WordStream found that the average click-through rate for ads on Facebook averages around 0.9% across all industries. Another study even found that back in 1930, people found them annoying; the majority of those surveyed found that ads fool the public, were exaggerated and unreasonable (Calfee & Jones Ringold, 1994).
Public opinion hasn’t changed much since then. Today you can find countless articles covering the topic or people complaining on different platforms about the number of ads they are shown. We have digital and even physical ad-blockers, so you know it’s a real dilemma. Though, others believe that it is not the ads that we dislike, but simply the ones that don’t understand their audience.
I agree partially — partially because the purpose of advertising and marketing is to attract people’s attention, entice them and transform them into customers. There’s no problem with that by itself. The issue lies where organisations do so aimlessly and confuse those people by intentionally disrupting them. Ultimately, it must be remembered that people are just on their medium of preference going about their day, and suddenly they are taken out of that space because an organisation is trying to force them into a specific mindset. One that the person probably can’t even relate with in the first place.
If it isn’t clear, as mentioned in other articles, people just want their problem to be solved — we all do. But if you advertise without knowing your audience and where and how they spend their time, how do you know what their problem is, whether your solution even solves it and that they should even consider your solution? This is usually where organisations, frustrated, want to go have a “rebrand” because their marketing efforts didn’t go as expected. A rebrand and mere change of visuals cannot fix a flawed marketing campaign. A lot of organisations confuse branding and marketing and use them interchangeably. Usually, they don’t know the answer to the above question, and, thus, never had a brand, to begin with.
Branding and marketing are very closely related, though. Where they blend is where a brand is expressed (visuals), which is the very surface layer of what everyone can see. However, branding is the one that comes first, as it’s about knowing who you are, what you do, why, and who for. Knowing so allows you to express in ways that shape perceptions of your brand, nurture relationships, and coherently build trust. Naturally, this takes a lot of time compared to marketing — which is more short-termed promotions in the hopes of driving sales. If you guessed then that marketing falls under branding, you’d be right. Marketing is a form of brand expression; if you choose to head in that direction first — a result of myopic thinking I see countless business leaders making — it’d be like starting a building from its frame instead of its foundation.
It can’t be helped that the tsunami of ads we’re experiencing today is partially to blame on companies such as Google and Facebook. These two have made advertising so accessible to the mainstream audience throughout the years; with Facebook basically penalising you for running ads organically, I wouldn’t blame people for skipping right to the frame and ignoring the foundation altogether. Google, on the other hand, is trying to “rectify” their wrongdoings with a technology called Privacy Sandbox. But we don’t know what to expect, as it has been delayed to late 2023.
Anyway, what ends up happening is that you either end up targeting everyone — which does not make much sense — in the hopes of making a sale, or your ads are deemed ineffective. Either way, both contribute to the noise of the however many ads we see in a day. Luckily humans have a coping mechanism that comes to the rescue whenever we experience sensory overload and become overwhelmed; we simply stop noticing them — like a built-in ad-blocker, if you will.
In the marketing world, there is a term for ads that don’t stand out, go unnoticed and are ultimately deemed ineffective; it’s called “Invisible Advertising”. While some marketers and advertisers acknowledge that the sins they commit are plentiful, they all seem to fear the most costly one; throwing all their money at something that lands in the void of invisibility.
The secret sauce to great advertising = the brain
I mentioned in a previous article that Apple and Nike are synonymous with exceptional branding. Almost always, people want to replicate them — even if it doesn’t make sense in their industry or to their audience. What both have in common is that they value trust and loyalty, and transform those into an experience for their audience. But time and again, it’s the visuals people are referring to and want to replicate.
“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world — it’s a very noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us — no company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us”.
Admitting to himself that Apple has spent a fortune on advertising to not much avail, he later in the video commends Nike for their ads and mentions that like them, the company will not be focussing at that point on the Macs they produce, their features, benefits, nor competitors. An interesting approach given Apple’s position — in 1997, they weren’t doing well, but they were pioneers in the industry — so they could have easily focussed on what made them in their eyes superior, and other more obvious matters, but didn’t.
To say that “Think Different” was greatly received is an understatement. What’s remarkable is that despite being the leader of one of the top companies in the world, Steve played an active role in the entire process. It goes to show that when you focus on emotions and experiences, you acknowledge that your audience isn’t only people, but you speak to an integral part of our brains.
See, people are fascinating creatures; it’s easy to spot organisations that understand this because the majority don’t. Whether it’s the Dunning–Kruger effect at play here or not, ultimately the reason why people don’t like ads is that they are condescending in nature and make them feel stupid. Knowledge-muscle-flexing is a thing; some organisations think that inflating their message automatically makes them important and stand out compared to others. “This surely would convince and propel the audience to take the desired action and purchase, they must think, we’re the most clever”. But features and benefits speak to the Neocortex — a much younger part of our brains — and thus, cannot compete with emotions, which is handled by the Limbic System — a part of our brain that is almost 100 million years older.
Abiding by neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean’s abandoned — but not completely wrong — theory of the “Triune Brain”, the brain comprises of three parts; the Neocortex, Limbic System and the oldest, the Reptilian brain. Throughout the day, the Neocortex is constantly at work, filtering out a majority of the information it deems irrelevant in order to continue working optimally. This is what I was referring to above; we find ourselves discarding information when overloaded sensorily.
Frankly, what this does is fortify a thought that a lot of people might not agree with — that which we are fairly irrational, emotional and primitive creatures. The Reptilian brain, behaving like a limiter, is the one that takes precedence in situations like these, as its purpose is to conserve energy as much as possible in order to survive. I’ve already mentioned this in previous writing, but perhaps it’s worth repeating here as well; “most of what we do, including the decisions we make, are emotional, not logical.” In other words, all the Neocortex does is logically try to justify what the emotional and primitive areas of our brains want.
Dan Wieden, the advertising executive who coined Nike’s “Just Do It”, said, “Nike didn’t discover the power of advertising, they discovered the power of their own voice”. Affirming the truth in this statement, I wonder what would have become of Apple had it not taken note of what Nike was doing and changed its approach. We might never know, but one thing is for sure, ignoring certain parts of the brain while focussing on others has proven to move people profoundly.
Wrapping Up
Although it is very difficult to talk about advertising and marketing without mentioning cookies and data-tracking, I tried my best to steer clear from them as very quickly the conversation can become technical. Furthermore, after much pondering, I realise that the matter at hand is not one with a simple solution. However, I might revisit the topic sometime in the future. Lou Montulli, a programmer responsible for various browser inventions, including cookies, disapproves of how it’s being used today. Originally invented in 1994 to solve memory issues (First-Party Cookies) — without them, a website would be forgetful and request you to log in again with every click on a new link, for example — the Third-Party ones — those used by advertisers — do a poor job in my opinion, when it comes to unifying the gathered data and actually providing people with a personalised experience.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with ads. Done effectively, they should make a reservation and occupy a space in the minds of a target audience and keep them aware of their options. But perhaps rather than resorting to myopic thinking and rushing to baseless or impracticable decisions, organisations can think a bit deeper on how humans function, consider a select few of them, figure out what problems they struggle with, how they can go about solving them for them, and how technology can aid in that. What I’m suggesting and leaning toward is a more human approach, where organisations are aware of who they are, what they provide and why, acknowledging that their solution is not and cannot be for everyone. In knowing this, understanding also that one can keep wasting resources and market themselves, but if the audience does not have that need, that they cannot be forced into a specific mindset no matter how much something is advertised to them.
Whether you’re a starting or existing entrepreneur, before you spend a fortune to reach more people with ad impressions, I’d like you to ponder these words by Gary Vaynerchuck. I believe that whether you’re a fan of his or not, that we can all admit that he sums the topic greatly when he says;
“I think it’s a really bad idea to keep showing people shit that they don’t want.”
Thanks for reading. Hopefully, this prompts you to take your brand (more) seriously. 🤔
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About Ilsmarie Presilia & The Ponder Lab
The Ponder Lab is a Netherlands based Brand Consultancy Studio that specialises in closing the gaps between businesses and their clients. It does so by offering services such as Strategy, Design & Development to elevate brands in an era where strong identities matter the most. The Ponder Lab was founded when Ilsmarie noticed a disconnect between customers and the solutions companies at which she was working were providing. She concluded that while the ideas were great, that their execution was poor, lacking depth and purpose. Now, she aims to ponder with her clients and familiarise them with how humans think and behave, and how to communicate their vision properly. Let’s Ponder!
