Ads don’t need data to be relevant.
Relevancy is such a weird word.
It’s one of those words, that seems to be everywhere.
Ads need to be relevant. Or else the customer will block it, ignore it or even worse, start hating you as an advertiser.
But it’s also one of those words, that do not pass the bullshit-test. You know the one where you negate the word, to see if it could make sense? If choosing relevancy is a strategic choice? Yeah, nobody is going to argue that ads should be irrelevant.
Mark Zuckerberg talked about relevancy, when defending the business model of Facebook at the hearings this April:
“What we found is that even though some people don’t like ads, people really don’t like ads that aren’t relevant.
“And while there is some discomfort for sure with using information in making ads more relevant, the overwhelming feedback that we get from our community is that people would rather have us show relevant content there than not.”
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So, people want ads that are relevant. And they want them so much, that they are willing to go through whatever discomfort they may feel about the data Facebook is collecting on them. This is why they need to collect all that data, according to Zuckerberg.
George Sadler, who is a senior director of marketing at Adobe, also said, at a Forrester conference in 2017, that marketers should focus on using data to create a single view of the customer. This would be the only way, he said, “to provide them with relevant experiences.”
But surveys have also shown, that consumers are beginning to express their concerns about the personal data policies of companies. We all know about GDPR, and recently the always excellent Marketoonist created this cartoon in response to an Accenture report, that half of US consumers are concerned about personal data privacy. The cartoon illustrates what he calls the marketing Catch-22: Consumers want personalized experiences, but are increasingly reluctant to give up the personal data that helps companies create those experiences.
Now, i think Tom unfortunately misses the point, and to be fair — the Accenture report talks about both personalized and relevant shopping experiences, so its easy to conflate personalization and relevancy. Both Mark Zuckerberg and George Sadler also fall into the same trap.
The trap is believing that personalization and relevancy is the same thing, when in reality personalization and relevancy are distinctly different. I don’t think consumers care about personalization. The fact that you start your newsletter by addressing the recipient by name doesn’t mean that much in the grand scheme of things. Consumers do however care about things being relevant to them. And in that, there is an underlying point. Because, while you will need data to personalize advertising, ads don’t need data to be relevant. At least not the type of digital data we usually associate with adtech, martech or Facebook and Google.
Instead, ads need insight. They need insight into customer habits, culture, trends, media-usage. They need insight into markets, competitors and society. Without this, you cannot make ads that create cultural and social stimulus to create mental availability. But to say that consumers want personalization is wrong. In fact, sometimes personalization can be a problem. The highly inspiring Faris Yakob already wrote a great article on this, that you should read.
But what then, is relevancy, if not something created from data?
Relevancy should be the goal of all advertising. As such, i believe relevancy is an empathetic exercise. Its the exercise of making the costumer feel, that what you are talking about (or the experience you are providing) is a reflexion of the customers own experiences (correlates with their knowledge, expectations, wants and needs.)
To do this, you need two ingredients: You need to create a message that will resonate with the customer. That message could either be capitalizing on a customer need or creating a new need, where there previously wasn’t one. Either way, you have to create mental availability, which is then accessed when the customers comes to buy, which could happen immediately or later.
You also need that particular message to be presented in a context, that it is suited for. Different mediums carry different propensities for ad effectiveness. The best to read out there on this, is Media In Focus by Les Binet & Peter Field, which among other things show the trade off between effectiveness in brand and sales activation on different media.
So my advice to you would be, dont try to create advertising that is personalized. Instead, aim to create advertising that is relevant.
The way you do this, is that you think about:
- What would be something my target group would react to, either now or later? What would be something that would leave an impression on them mentally or make them act and do something?
And then figure out whether or not that something needs to be personalized to work, and what data you can use to make that personalization. Not the other way around.
