A Call for Relevant Advertising

At the Facebook 2014 Q4 earnings call, Sheryl Sandberg called out the key factor that drives success or failure in advertising: relevance. The knee-jerk reaction that many of us share when we hear the word advertising is to swat at it like a house fly. Our experience with advertising to date has mostly been disappointing. The fact that average click-through rates hover around 1/2000 today, puts some quantity to our pain. 1,999 times we have had our browsing experience distracted by side-bars or pop-ups, our time interrupted during a TV episode, and our view of the skyline littered with billboards of things that have no relevance to us. Over the years, our jacket of common courtesy wears thin, and ad-blockers, banner blindness, and general apathy increase the distance between us and the well-intentioned businesses who merely wish to add value to our lives in order to turn a profit.

In spite of all of this pent-up resentment against ads, we can also all think back to a time where we actually clicked on an ad. I’ve asked several people what they were feeling when they last (purposely) clicked on an ad. None of them felt frustration. Gratitude was a common theme, sometimes bundled with curiosity. Something had been placed in their path that did add value. Something that was relevant to them, and they were grateful for it.

So if the name of the game is getting the right message to the right person at the right place and time, then why have we resorted to broadcasting largely irrelevant advertisements all over the place? That’s how it seems to the consumer. An executive in the advertising industry might feel that statement is a bit harsh, and begin talking about how ads are actually “targetted” toward audiences where they are likely to be better received. Targetting an advertisement means linking the it to characteristics correlated with groups of people that might find value in the ad. You wouldn’t advertise razor blades on a children’s website, for example. Putting an advertisement for ice cream on the site doesn’t mean that the child will immediately get up and tell his parents about the new kind of ice cream he sees. The child’s age (a key characteristic for targetting) has nothing to do with what causes him to take action. As Clayton Christensen best put it, what causes a person to “pull” a product or service into their life is that they have a job they need to do. These “jobs” need not be limited to functional tasks – emotional “jobs,” such as needing to feel successful, fit in this model as well. Right now we have a dysfunctional mapping between spreading awareness of a product or service or brand, and the individual jobs-to-be-done that arise in a person’s life, which ultimately define what is relevant to him or her.

It is easy to Buy ordering viagra from canada Online from local or online drug store. It truly is also advised to take a single pill per day only. steal here discount viagra the usa It takes 45 minutes for kamagra tablets as prescription for ordering viagra the best remedy to treat their sexual disorder. Although the human body is the pinnacle of evolution, it is tadalafil overnight delivery still a fragile organism and susceptible to injuries of several kinds. Perhaps the answer doesn’t lie in the field of marketing, which takes a one-size-fits everyone in the target market approach. Perhaps we can learn a thing or two from sales and consulting industries, which specialize in defining a problem a client has, designing a solution, deploying it and then managing it: with the goal of relevance and customer satisfaction throughout. In any case, this blog is dedicated to exploring this dilemma with hopes that we can find a new approach to bringing relevance into advertising.

 

 

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