Advertising and generational drift
My regular Friday column in Expansión, Spain’s leading financial daily is titled “Generational drift” (pdf in Spanish), and discusses the development of new advertisings trends in the wake of Snapchat’s first advertising campaign, launched last week, one that marks a departure with segmentation, the approach that has characterized publicity on the social networks until now.
Segmentation means breaking up a target public on the basis of demographics, interests, preferences, purchasing behavior, etc. Unlike television or radio, which can only segment on the basis of time slots or related content, segmentation allows advertisers to focus on a particular group it believes is likely to respond positively to its sales pitch.
But as the short post on Snapchat’s blog nicely explains, a new generation of social network users is turned off by this approach, finding it “creepy”: what they really want are essentially traditional advertisements that are not based on segmentation. The nub of the issue is that advertising is becoming a social object, not something that reaches people on the basis of their characteristics (thus creating FOMO, Fear of Missing Out, which is based on preferences and behavior), and which has led to the creation of advertising formats that should not only be considered cool or intrinsically attractive, but that should avoid hassling or bombarding the recipient, thus turning them off.
This is what I call the Cannes’ Lions syndrome, whereby people who would normally turn away from advertising are prepared to watch an hour’s worth of award-winning spots at a prestige film festival. It’s not that we don’t like advertising; it’s that we don’t like bad advertising or being forced to watch the same advertisement over and over, however good it is.
The most interesting aspect of this is how a generation that had come to be seen as having rejected privacy and that lived its collective life like an open book has now rejected segmentation and moved toward social networks with restrictions on what is shared, something that older people had already come to appreciate. If your business is based on segmented advertising, you might want to think about how trends are changing.
Below, the text in full:
Generational drift
Snapchat’s stratospheric growth (it is now valued at $10 billion) is challenging many of the ideas we had about how young people behave and see the world.
Many of us have tended to thing that teens and pre-teens had rejected the idea of privacy, and that they were willing to share every aspect of their lives with the rest of the world. But we have been surprised to see them abandon Facebook on the grounds of its privacy model, taking refuge instead in Snapchat, with its self-destructing messages and advertising that doesn’t segment users.
What the kids seem to be saying loud and clear is: no more segmentation. Let me spell it out: adults see segmentation as possessing the advantage over television and radio, because it his able to adapt to the target audience’s taste and preferences; but the new generation rejects the idea of being put into little boxes, and are calling for a return to “old-fashioned” advertising: ever time they receive a segmented ad, it just reminds them of all the information that the advertiser in question has been able to accumulate about them. And they don’t like it; they feel like they’re being pressured.
If Snapchat really does mark a change in the way young people feel about advertising, it’s not just Facebook, whose $3 billion acquisition was turned down, that should be worried: Google has reason to be concerned as well. This is a company that has built its empire on advertising based on what we search for on the internet, precisely what young people seem to be turning away from. And if the preferences of the younger generation seem to be toward products and services that do not trade in their personal information, then the Mountain View company has a big problem on its hands, what we might call a generational drift problem.
(En español, aquí)
