Most of us have a few “pet peeves” when it comes to the advertising and promotional tactics we find obtrusive or just plain irritating.
Recently, Consumer Reports studied this issue. In June 2014, it published an article citing the marketing tactics Americans say they like the least. The findings were collected via its own survey of a cross-section of U.S. adults age 18 or over.
Of the tactics covered in the survey, some might be considered only mildly irritating … but others are horribly intrusive.
Let’s start with the marketing tactics that the survey respondents roundly disliked:
#1. Telemarketing robocalls: ~77% dislike
#2. False claims of winning a prize: ~74%
#3. “Official” direct mail that appears to be an invoice or a check: ~71%
#4. Pop-up ads on websites: ~70%
#5. Ads for nutritional supplements making exaggerated claims: ~70%
#6. Videos that play before viewers can view their desired web content: ~66%
#7. TV advertising that plays louder than the program itself: ~63%
Another three marketing tactics were also disliked, but by a smaller proportion of respondents:
#8. Fast-talking disclaimers on broadcast ads: ~50%
#9. Infomercials: ~42%
#10. Ads for sensitive personal medical conditions: ~38%
Wrapping up the list were these four tactics which respondents considered least objectionable:
#11. Products advertised as “American made” that actually aren’t
#12. “Free” offers – but with strings attached
#13. Targeted online ads that show based on viewer purchases, behavior or demographics
#14. Product placement in TV programs and movies
#15. Billboard advertising
Of all the 15 MarComm tactics evaluated, my own “Top 2” personal dislikes are #4 and #6.
I’m in the marketing field myself, so I guess I should be tolerant of these techniques … but I think my time online is way more valuable than that!
I’ve blogged before about the dismal performance of web banner ads, with their miniscule clickthrough rates resulting from “banner blindness.”
The situation has caused more than a few marketers to shy away from engaging in any sort of banner advertising online — and it’s not hard to understand why.
But as Ben Kunz, a vice president at media buying and planning agency Mediassociates likes to point out, other forms of display advertising have similar challenges.
The fact that omnibus marketing information resource eMarketer has predicted that digital ad spending will increase to ~$132 billion this year is proof that many advertisers continue to see the value in online display advertising.
So what is Kunz’s major argument? Simply this: Digital ads have the same challenges that television, radio and print advertising have as well. In Kunz’s view, there’s huge waste in advertising because of advertising’s very nature.
He is correct. The vast majority of ad impressions that are “served” are never really seen or heard — regardless of the ad medium.
Ad visibility online is an issue for sure. Proving the point, internet analytics company comScore evaluated some 290 billion ad impressions on thousands of web sites … and found that ~54% of them weren’t visible.
There was some differentiation the comScore detected between different types of sites. Ads served up on “Ppemium” web publisher sites performed better (only ~39% of theirs weren’t visible).
Ads that aren’t visible occur for a variety of reasons, one of which is fraud (fake web traffic). But more often, it’s because of slow load times on digital devices or because the ads fall outside a viewable browser window or further down that page, necessitating scrolling that many viewers simply don’t do.
The Swedish firm Sticky has investigated banner blindness from another angle — studying the eyeball movements of ~500 subjects. Its research found that of the digital ads that do appear within a viewable window, only ~51% of them are actually “seen” by the viewer.
Mashing it all up, it means that roughly three out of four online ads are “invisible” to viewers. It’s a lot of waste for sure.
But then … what’s the alternative? Do other advertising tactics and channels actually do better?
Nope. According to Kunz, at least three out of four newspaper ads aren’t seen, either.
Ben Kunz
Here’s how he arrives at that conclusion. The average U.S. newspaper has ~60 pages, with an average number of ads per page of around 20 (this includes large ads and smaller classifieds). Around half of the pages are unopened when someone reads the paper, meaning that those ads are “unviewable.” If half of the remaining ads are ignored as well, the viewability stats are effectively tied.
Kunz also contends that ~30% of radio advertising is “invisible,” citing an Arbitron study that quantified the extent to which listeners switch stations when advertising came on, then flip back later.
The findings were such that Arbitron started recommending that media planners change their measurement from 100 GRPs to 70 GRPs, reflecting the fact that ~30% of radio ads paid for never make it human ears.
TV advertising? It’s the same phenomenon.
Trips to the refrigerator or the bathroom abound during commercial breaks — not to mention channel flipping or TiVo-ing. Kunz contends that such ad-dodging techniques reduce TV ad viewability by as much as 75%.
The bottom line on all of this: Waste in digital advertising is a significant issue … but it’s a similar issue with other ad vehicles as well.
Add to this the fact that digital advertising offers the best metrics (accountability for every click and conversion action), and it should come as little surprise that digital ad spending continues to grow (and why eMarketer expects it to reach about a quarter of all ad spending this year).
Does Kunz have a point about offline and online advertising sharing similar “blindness” characteristics? What are your thoughts? Please share your perspectives with other readers.
It’s so common to hear weighty pronouncements about the changing world of advertising and how the ground is shifting under the discipline.
It seems that we get one of these “new horizons” commentaries about every other week or so.
That’s why it’s refreshing to hear a few countervailing voices among the breathless babble. These are the voices of reason that move past the hyperbole and provide some sober grounding.
Another industry specialist whose comments are always worth noting is Tom Goodwin, head of Tomorrow Innovation, a digital marketing consultancy. He’s identified five big myths about today’s advertising environment which need “calling out,” as he puts it.
What are Goodwin’s myths? They’re shown below, along with Goodwin’s “quasi-contrarian” views about them.
“TV is dead.”
Nope. More people are watching television than ever before — and that’s looking at just the mature USA and UK markets. Goodwin contends that TV advertising has never been more valuable — and most commercials are viewed rather than skipped over. But they’re viewed on many kinds of devices, of course.
Goodwin’s take: “TV is here to stay … [but] the notion of ‘television’ generates false boundaries to what’s possible with video advertising when [people] consume video in so many new ways.”
“Consumers want conversations with brands.”
No they don’t, Goodwin contends: “The conversations I most often see are those of disgruntled customers, given the microphone to complain that Twitter provides. It strikes me overwhelmingly, with remarkably few exceptions, that for most brands, people want an outcome or resolution or perhaps information — and not a conversation.”
“Brands must create good content.”
Goodwin acknowledges that content delivered by brands needs to be inherently valuable. But it’s more complicated than just that: “Branded content is not meritocratic — you can’t say any one piece of content is ‘better’ than another. Perhaps the best real test of content is when it’s served, how, and who it reaches and the value it provides.”
“Advertising is about storytelling.”
Goodwin contends that advertising people are buying their own hype with this whopper. “Let’s not delude ourselves that advertising is not about selling stuff,” he emphasizes.
“Advertising dollars should correlate with consumers’ time spent with media.”
Goodwin claims that advertising industry players feel a compulsion to “be where the people are,” under the assumption that people will engage with advertising in similar ways whether they’re online or offline, on a mobile device or a desktop, and so on.
Because of this thinking, media spend projections looking into the future “bear no resemblance” to what’s working or not working — or how it’s even possible to spend that much money advertising in the channels like mobile.
How have these myths of Goodwin’s taken hold in the first place? Is it because talking about them seems so much more interesting and important than contending that advertising is continuing on a more familiar trajectory?
Goodwin thinks this may be part of it. Certainly, he acknowledges that times are changing dramatically in advertising — as they have been for some time. But he makes a plea for more wisdom and nuance:
“While nobody gets famous (or a promotion) saying things are complex or largely unchanged … it’s closer to the truth.”
Personally, having spent a quarter century years in the marketing communications field, I feel that Tom Goodwin has raised some very interesting and valid points.
Where do you come down on them? Do you agree or disagree with the five “myths” Goodwin has identified in modern advertising? Leave a comment and share your thoughts for the benefit of other readers.
When it comes to the news, Americans say they’re tired of so much attention on celebrity gossip and scandal stories … but are they really?
Experience has shown that healthy foods on the menu at fast food establishments test well in consumer attitudinal surveys — only to bomb big time when actually introduced.
It seems as though many people answer the way they think they’re “supposed” to respond, even though they’ll never actually opt for the apple slices in lieu of the order of fries.
I wonder if the same dynamics are at work in a recent Harris Poll, which queried ~2,500 Americans age 18 or over about their preferences for news topics. The online survey was conducted in August 2014, with the results released this past week.
For starters, three-fourths of the respondents felt that celebrity gossip and scandal stories receive too much coverage.
Indeed, many believe that entertainment news in general receives too much attention in the news:
Celebrity gossip and scandal stories: ~76% claim too much attention is paid in the news
Entertainment news in general: ~49%
Professional spectator sports: ~44%
Politics and elections: ~33%
And which topics do people feel aren’t covered sufficiently in the news? It’s everything that’s “good for you”:
Education topics: ~47% believe too little attention is paid in the news
Local/national humanitarian issues: ~47%
Science topics: ~45%
Government corruption and scandals: ~44%
Corporate corruption and white collar crime: ~42%
Global humanitarian issues: ~33%
Health topics: ~30%
I suspect that the “actual reality” is different from how the survey participants responded. If news organizations weren’t seeing keen interest generated by their celebrity, entertainment and sports stories, they would stop producing them. Simple as that.
Hint: trust levels are nearly where they should be …
What are your thoughts about news topics? Which ones are getting proper coverage versus too much? Please share your observations with other readers here.
Print advertising may be atrophying, but it’s still important enough to be the overwhelming revenue stream for city and regional magazine publishers.
According to the latest annual survey of media in this category, conducted by FOLIO last month, most publishing titles continue to rely on print for the vast bulk of the revenues they generate.
But before we look at FOLIO’s figures today, let’s see what’s happened over the past decade or so.
Print advertising revenues in this segment of the publishing industry represented over 95% of overall revenue as late as 2005. It’s dropped since then – but it hasn’t declined all that much, all things considered.
Here’s what FOLIO’s research findings are showing today:
Print advertising: Represents ~75% of all revenues
Paid subscriptions: ~6%
Custom publishing: ~6%
Digital media: ~5%
Events: ~3%
Mobile products: ~1%
Mercantile data (e.g., list rental):Less than 1%
Compared to Folio’s 2013 survey, print advertising has declined slightly (from ~77% of overall revenues in 2013), but paid subscription revenues are down sharply (from about 10%).
Within this publication category, there are some differences between large and small publishers. Larger brands (those generating more than $5 million in revenues) rely less on print advertising; it’s only about 65% of their earnings.
With smaller publication titles, it’s been significantly more challenging to diversify away from print. They’re still relying on print ad sales to generate more than 80% of their revenue. And that percentage hasn’t changed in five years.
Right now, digital media accounts for only about 9% of total revenues generated by the larger media properties in this segment. But managers at these publications anticipate that revenue from digital platforms will continue to grow at a faster clip.
In fact, they foresee a jump of nearly 30% in digital media revenues this year alone.
The FOLIO report notes that the increase in digital revenues is coming from better monetization strategies for existing products, rather than the introduction of new ones.
Considering why publishers in the city and regional magazine category continue to rely on print versus other revenues, I think it goes back to the idea that consumers don’t consider these properties strong sources for “instant” or “breaking” news.
Behaviorally, there’s more of a propensity to browse through story topics in a more “linear” fashion. The emphasis on human interest and region-centric news also aligns more with a more traditional approach to journalism, where most every news story tends to have some sort of a “human” dimension.
Quite a few stories are long-form journalism, or ones that feature high-quality photography. Far fewer of them are time-sensitive. They lend themselves to a more leisurely perusal.
Even so, it would seem that broader trends regarding the way consumers are interacting with media — and the platforms they’re using to consumer them — destined to overtake the city/regional magazine category.
Face it, there are always going to be complaints about marketing-oriented e-mails. Just as in the “bad-old-days” of junk postal mail, consumers are conditioned to pass negative judgment on the volume of promotional-oriented e-mails that flood their inboxes.
True to form, according to a new study by global business, technology and marketing advisory firm Forrester Research, consumer attitudes about e-mail marketing are pretty negative.
Here’s what a sampling of U.S. respondents age 18 or older reported on the “minus” side of the ledger:
I delete most e-mail advertising without reading it: ~42% of respondents reported
I receive too many e-mail offers and promotions: ~39%
There’s nothing of interest: ~38%
I have unsubscribe from unsolicited lists: ~37%
I wonder how companies get my e-mail address: ~29%
It’s difficult to unsubscribe from e-lists: ~24%
There’s far less to show on the “plus” side:
It’s a great way to discover new products and promotions: ~24% of respondents reported
I read e-mails “just in case”: ~19%
I forward marketing e-mails to friends sometimes: ~12%
I purchase items advertised through e-mail: ~7%
I wasn’t surprised at all by these finds.
What’s interesting, however, is that the attitudes of consumers are actually trending a bit better than they were in previous Forrester field studies.
Specifically, respondents exhibited improved attitudes in the following areas:
Fewer respondents are deleting most marketing-oriented e-mail promos without reading them (~42% vs. ~44% in 2012 and ~59% in 2010).
Fewer respondents report that marketing e-mails offer “nothing of interest” (~38% vs. ~41% in 2012).
The percentages are also slightly better for the consumers today who consider e-mails as a good way to discover new products and promotions. Additionally, the percentages are lower on complaints about receiving too many e-mail offers.
The bottom line on these results: It looks as if consumers have come to terms with the pluses and minuses of e-mail marketing. As they once did with postal mail, they recognize the negative attributes as a fact of life — something that just “comes with the territory” for anyone who is online.
In the Western world, humans have been viewing and processing information in the same basic ways for hundreds of years. It’s a subconscious process that entails expending the most judicious use of time and effort to forage for information.
Because of how we Westerners read and write – left-to-right and top-to-bottom – the way we’ve evolved searching for information mirrors the same sort of behavior.
And today we have eye-scanning research and mouse click studies that prove the point.
In conducting online searches, where we land on information is known variously as the “area of greatest promise,” the “golden triangle,” or the “F-scan diagram.”
However you wish to name it, it generally looks like this on a Google search engine results page (SERP):
It’s easy to see how the “area of greatest promise” exists. We generally look for information by scanning down the beginning of the first listings on a page, and then continue viewing to the right if something seems to be a good match for our information needs, ultimately resulting in a clickthrough if our suspicions are correct.
Heat maps also show that quick judgments of information relevance on a SERP occur within this same “F-scan” zone; if we determine nothing is particularly relevant, we’re off to do a different keyword search.
This is why it’s so important for websites to appear within the top 5-7 organic listings on a SERP – or within the top 1-3 paid search results in the right-hand column of Google’s SERP.
In recent years, Google and other search engines have been offering enhancements to the traditional SERP, ranging from showing images across the top of the page to presenting geographic information, including maps.
To what degree is this changing the “conditioning” of people who are seeking out information today compared to before?
What new eye-tracking and heat maps are showing is that we’re evolving to looking at “chunks” of information first for clues as to the promising areas of results. But then within those areas, we revert to the same “F-scan” behaviors.
Here’s one example:
And there’s more: The same eye-tracking and heat map studies are showing that this two-step process is actually more time-efficient than before.
We’re covering more of the page (at least on the first scan), but are also able to zero in on the most promising information bits on the page. Once we find them, we’re quicker to click on the result, too.
So while Google and other search engines may be “conditioning” us to change time-honored information-viewing habits, it’s just as much that we’re “conditioning” Google to organize their SERPs in ways that are easiest and most beneficial to us in the way be seek out and find relevant information.
Bottom line, it’s continuity among the chaos. And it proves yet again that the same “prime positioning” on the page favored for decades by advertisers and users alike – above the fold and to the left – still holds true today.
It seems like there’s a story every other day about security breaches affecting e-commerce sites and other websites where consumers congregate.
And now we have quantification of the challenge. Ghostery, a provider of apps that enable consumers to identify and block company tracking on website pages, has examined instances of non-secure digital technologies active on the websites of 50 leading brands in key industry segments like news, financial services, airlines and retail.
More specifically, Ghostery was looking for security “blind spots,” which it defines as non-secure tags that are present without the permission of the host company.
What it found was that 48 of the 50 websites it studied had security blind spots.
And often it’s not just one or two instances on a website. The analysis found that retail web pages host a high concentration of non-secure technologies: 438 of them on the Top Ten retail sites it analyzed (companies like Costco, Kohls, Overstock.com, Target and Walmart).
Financial services sites are also hit hard, with 382 blind spots identified, while airline websites had 223 instances. And they’re often present on the pages described as “secure” on these websites.
Scott Meyer, who is Ghostery’s chief executive officer, had this to say about the situation:
“Companies have very little understanding of what’s happening on their websites. The problem is not with any of the company’s marketing stacks, it’s with their own tech stacks. What these companies have now is marketing clouds, not websites, and they’ve gotten complicated and hard to manage.”
Scott Meyer, CEO of Ghostery (formerly The Better Advertising Project and Evidon).
There was one leading brand web site that came off looking squeaky clean compared to the others: Amazon. “Amazon is incredibly sophisticated; others are not,” Meyer noted.
The implications of avoiding addressing these security blind spots could be seriously negative. Bot networks often use non-secure technologies to gain entry to websites. Google is indexing company websites higher in search engine results based on their security ratings.
It makes it all the more important for companies to audit their websites and set up system alerts to identify the non-secure tags.
For the leading brands in particular, they just need to suck it up and do it for the benefit of their millions of customers.
The articles of business thinker and writer Gord Hotchkiss are some of my favorite “go-to” columns on the web because they’re invariably thought-provoking pieces to read.
In one recent column, Hotchkiss poses an interesting set of questions and points surrounding what he dubs the emerging “metaphysical corporation.” He notes that more business today is being conducted in non-physical markets.
As he points out, “Businesses used to produce stuff. Now they produce ideas.”
To illustrate this claim, Hotchkiss cites a recent evaluation issued by intellectual property merchant bank Ocean Tomo, which reports that the asset mix of companies has undergone a massive shift over the past 40 years.
In 1975, tangible assets — equipment, buildings, inventory and land — made up more than 80% of the asset market value of the S&P 500 companies.
In just 35 years, that ratio has flipped completely. Intangible assets — patents, trademarks, goodwill, brand equity — now make up 80% of the S&P 500’s asset market value.
To Hotchkiss, this trend promised to have major implications on the future structure of corporations. He notes:
Historically, companies that made physical products needed a supply chain. Vertical integration was the common way to remove physical “transactional friction” from the manufacturing process. And vertical integration was best managed through hierarchical management styles.
On the other hand, companies that sell ideas or intangible products need to have a network. By their very nature, these networks don’t have physical friction, so supply chains aren’t required. In fact, attempting to control a network via a centralized organizational structure tends to be counterproductive, as branches of the network are prone to wither under such constraints.
Economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin takes this point even further. In his new book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Rifkin contends that capitalism as we know it is dying a slow death, to be replaced by a new “collaborative common market” made possible by the shrinkage of marginal costs.
Building on this notion, Hotchkiss concludes:
“As we move from the physical to the metaphysical, the cost of producing consumable services or digital concept-based products … drops dramatically. Capital was required to overcome physical transactional friction. If that friction disappears, so does the need for capital.”
Like other big trends, this transformation won’t happen overnight. But it will happen by degrees in the coming years and decades, according to Hotchkiss.
… So much so that the corporates structure we know today will be all-but-unrecognizable to workers 50 years from now.
I find this theory pretty fascinating, and I certainly recognize the logic behind it. What are your thoughts about it? Are Hotchkiss and Rifkin onto something? Please share your thoughts with other readers here.
Wes’ question asked to what degree social media activity actually decides U.S. elections.
In other words, is social media “buzz” enabling campaigns to win elections that would have been won by a different candidate otherwise?
If you look at the sheer volume of YouTube posts, Facebook pages and sharing of breaking news on Twitter that’s being pushed out there by political campaigns, surely they must think that these social platforms are having an impact.
But what about a more scientific look into it? I searched around for answers and found one such analysis.
Here are two important pieces of data NM Incite uncovered:
Observation #1: In three out of four election campaigns, the candidate who was the most frequently mentioned on social media was the one who ultimately won the election.
Observation #2: The share of online “buzz” for each winning candidate was higher than the share of votes the winner actually won.
These two observations raise the next question: Is there a “causal” relation between social media presence and positive results on election night? These findings don’t tell us that.
Instead, it may be that winning candidates are doing a better job at more than merely social media to win their races. Their campaigns are just better organized and more adept at hitting on all cylinders.
Here’s one other finding from NM Incite’s evaluation that suggests that social may be an ornamentation and not the tree: States with higher levels of voter turnout tend to be the ones with lower levels of online buzz about their candidates.
So there’s little evidence to suggest that social media buzz is generating higher voter participation.
I’d say we need more research on this topic. It’s a rapidly changing environment, no doubt. An analysis that dates back to 2010 and 2012 is like a lifetime in online political campaigning. Has anyone come across any newer research?
Most of us have a few “pet peeves” when it comes to the advertising and promotional tactics we find obtrusive or just plain irritating.
Nones Notes 