The overall value of advertising is falling because there’s too much stuff out there. Consumers are bombarded everyday by thousands of messages from a whole host of content producers such as films, news, music, ads, branded content and UCG, to name but a few.
This is driving ad budgets up as brands produce ever more elaborate content – just think about the money, time and effort that goes into the Superbowl ads or the UK Christmas retail ads. They then feel the pressure to put it everywhere (fragmentation means it’s harder to build coverage so we need loads of layers of communication).
This leads to 4 distinct problems:
There are just too many messages. It’s almost impossible to get to grips with everything you are sent.
And this isn’t good news when you take into consideration the next big problem. The consumer’s short attention span. News snacking, short form video, Twitter’s 140 characters, mobile short-form – all of these things serve to consistently draw the consumer’s attention away.
And this is the final problem with content saturation. The ease and ability of the consumer to move onto the next thing. Your next bit of content is only one click away. Recommendation engines tell you that if this content is crap, then move to the next content. And again, and again. If you can’t be bothered to finish reading something, there’s probably a top 23 list of cute cat pics to look at.
And this leads to the final problem. So much of these messages are absolute rubbish.
Sites like Buzzfeed are massive proponents of this and are becoming hugely successful in targeting almost everybody with masses and masses of content till it almost becomes white noise.
This leads to the perceived value becoming so low that you just throw it away and move on. Even free newspapers propagate this – the consumer can’t help but think: “If I didn’t pay for the news why should I keep it?”
So, why shouldn’t we all just hang up our media plans and head into early retirement? (Or a cushdy little content job at Buzzfeed).
Well, because actually advertising still works – on conscious and unconscious levels – all the econometric and other industry research suggests that the business value return from advertising is still strong.
At Carat we believe in redefining the business value of media for clients (not just media value) by making the most of the opportunities provided by media convergence.
Basically, in the hands of a smart media planner, the problems outlined above can actually be turned into advantages to drive more and better business value.
A campaign of ours where we listened to social media to predict what the mood of the nation would be at any given point (called the Spirit Level) meant that we could actually pinpoint our messaging not just to the right people in the right place at the right time but, critically, in the right mood.
Sales rose 9% YOY (when only Spirit Level media was running).
We’re in a connected and convergent world where a consumer can be engaged with content and moved to a transaction in the same moment, so we should be able to drive even more value from advertising, not less.
So (if you don’t have a clever media planner to hand to whip these problems into successes) how can you drive business value in a market saturated with content.
1. Be more relevant. Technology allows us to understand who we’re talking to, so we can cut through all that clutter and be relevant to specific consumers.
On-demand video providers like 4oD (Channel 4’s online streaming service) typically have demographic information about their viewers, like age and gender. This allowed us to create a campaign for Vauxhall where we could deliver separate car ads for male and female viewers, making the content far more relevant to them personally.
2. Capitalise on the context to increase relevancy. For example Oreo’s now famous Superbowl ad – they watched, they acted with speed, they grabbed people’s imagination. We did something similar for adidas and SPOTY. Murray won, we had an ad projected on the building outside saying: “Not bad for someone with no personality” which garnered a huge amount of social traction.
3. Don’t be too worthy. Yes we can build complicated relationships with our customers, but unless you’re incredibly lucky or have an amazing product that engages in its own right don’t expect big numbers to engage in something complex and on-going. But that’s ok – Oreo’s, Murray, they grabbed the moment, made the most of it and moved on to something new.
4. Use convergent (connected and moving on to the next thing) behaviour to our advantage to move consumers from engagement to transaction. In a campaign for very.co.uk we secured the world’s largest Product Placement deal (at the time) and filled the Big Brother House with very.co.uk goods and made them available to buy through click-to-buy technology. You could literally shop the Big Brother House.
What some see as a big challenge to advertising we see as an opportunity to use technology and convergent behaviour to deliver great content to our hungry audiences, engage them and move them closer to the brands and to transaction – therefore building business value.
