The success of a business lies in how effectively we market it. This includes building awareness, differentiation, persuasion to make our desired customers spend or invest in the product our service or business offers. This time tested fact remains unchanged. However, something crucial has changed.
The role of advertising has transformed. All businesses need today is for people to feel remotely curious about something to make them search for more information online. Today, if our marketing initiatives are not aimed at audiences who are already drawn towards us, it may mean we are making ourselves vulnerable to irrelevance.
The danger in being preoccupied with ‘traditional persuasion’ thinking is that we end up completely ignoring customers who are, figuratively speaking, dying for our product, brand and service. A void many new companies have recognised and by keeping their messaging simple, clean and informational are winning hearts.
We live in a world with two kinds of companies. Ones that are indexed on “who we are” and “what makes us great” narratives and ones that focus on “what we do for you” and “how to reach/buy us easily” narratives. In a different time the former held value but in the easy-information, quick service times of today, consumers know what they want and tend to be blind to anything but that. Impressing is no use unless accompanied with informing.
The selling mentality fundamentally involves manipulating consumer mindsets to make them buy what we offer. The informing mentality involves understanding consumer needs to help them with the information they need about what we offer, providing assurance in their decision making process. Does this mean a compromise on creative, intelligent advertising? The verdict is out on that. It would definitely mean more humane, no drama advertising and marketing.
At a time when advertisements were purely an interruption, it was necessary for ads to be entertaining. In the current skip-ads ecosystem, we follow the same principle and have come up with countless creative attempts to make the audience not skip our ad. The million dollar question remains: what motivation would someone fully aware that they can search for anything they want at any time have to not skip an ad, no matter how entertaining and compelling? The irony is that when we are searching for information on the very brand/product/service that interrupted us while we were watching/reading something else would again be interrupted by countless other brands that are not of current interest at that moment.
Perhaps ‘ads’ and ‘interruptions’ will remain interchangeable as concepts. However, as brands and companies, we now have a brilliant other way to connect with potential and existing customers. In the chaos of creating enrapturing interruptions, are we missing out on providing information as and when needed?
Conventionally, we are also attached to the skill of telling brands stories in 30 secs. But the truth which has been hitting us in the face for a while now is that we need to be able to do it in half that time. In fact we need to be elastic in how quickly and how long we take to pique audience interest. Today, there is no reason to tell a story without providing a means for our audience to engage with us. It will be a matter of time before we acknowledge that no one ever actively opts to ‘not skip’ ads – not when they are playing games, not when they are browsing apps, not when they are reading news online, not when they are watching YouTube videos and not when they are listening to Spotify. Surely and steadily, advertisements are meta morphing from interruptions to information and engagement when our customers look for it.
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