Why Marketing Texts Fail at Marketing
Why nobody reads your ads
After reading some of my posts, one might get an impression that our company consists solely of haters of direct advertising. Well, that is just not true.
Direct advertising is a very useful thing, and sometimes it can be a literal masterpiece as proven by certain Super Bowl commercials. The thing is that everything has its rightful place, and the same thing may work great or be completely useless under different circumstances.
Some of our past customers wanted us to do direct advertising. More accurately, they wanted us to create and disseminate marketing texts that looked like extatic prayers to the sponsor. Time after time we had to explain that native advertising or not, such texts just won’t cut it because nobody would want to read them. And then we had to explain why.
Nobody would want to spend their time and attention on something they don’t really care about. You’re not likely to read a giant feature on electric fans if you’re not an electric fan geek. You won’t read news on a new DC movie if you don’t give a damn about Batman, and deep inside you’re a Marvel person. You will hardly heed any posts on Game of Thrones if you never watched it and have no intention to do so. If you start reading those things nonetheless, you’re very likely to drop it long before the final paragraph. The only possible reason why you would still read it in its fullness is if someone blackmails you into doing so.
If you read something you’re not very interested in, you would feel it forced inside your head, and it will cause you to spend much effort trying to assimilate it. It happens when you study for an exam for a class you don’t really care about. It happens when you have to read something work-related while wanting to have a vacation. It happens when your friend tells you a boring story about someone they know but you don’t, and who the hell are all those people, please make it stop.
Those are the reasons why direct advertising in texts won’t work. It is a sales pitch nobody asked for. It’s a long list of praises that nobody takes seriously. It’s a call to action only a handful of people are willing to take. The overall effect consists in borderline violence against the reader’s consciousness. As a result, such text would drive people away from the advertised product, i.e. have an effect that’s completely inverse to that intended.
That’s the heart of the reason why native advertising came to be. In the world where people rightfully ignore banners and despise unsolicited sales pitches, the only way to convey a brand’s message is to make the message interesting and appealing to the intended audience. And the only way to make it interesting is to make it useful, entertaining, or educative. Whatever you come up with when creating a native ad, it will fall into one of those three categories. Or maybe two or even all of them.
Of course, nobody can prohibit one to write and publish prolonged odes to a product or a brand. It just will be ad for an ad’s sake, without any practical value. And it will also be boring.
That’s all for today. Stay tuned.
