The ad business model is dead, long live creativity

How the advertising industry needs to embrace unlearning

Over the weekend, Stefan and I held a talk and hosted a panel at the Weekend Media Festival in Rovinj Croatia. The topic was a theme on which we speak often and passionately, the Power of Unlearning.

One basic premise of the theme is that:

When a new medium first appears we tend to use old content in that medium until we more or less figure out its native possibilities.

A second premise is that old communication and advertising business model of ‘let’s go where the people are and show them stuff’ is resulting in tired consumers. Both of these, require a drastic paradigm shift, especially when it comes to digital.

Think of any online platform you visit. It’s populated by digital versions of billboards and often worse, outplay videos. YouTube’s version of the TV remote control is the SKIP THIS AD button. As advertisers increasingly populate our online content with as much stuff as possible, consumers are increasingly opting out of being advertised to. Why? Much of the content is irrelevant, made so by automated media buying, but worse, it is creating an irritating user experience.

Here’re simple examples. John Gruber recently posted an article outlining the following aggravating reality:

Gruber is a big fan of iMac, the brand’s blog. An avid reader of what he considers good and relevant content, when filled with ads, that content becomes a heavy pain. A 517 word blog post in effect is about 200 KB. When all surrounding advertising is accounted for, that same post weighs 14 MB. An article of 517 words, in effect, weighs the equivalent of 7,000,000 words. To put that in perspective, 7,000,000 words is the equivalent of the written content of 10 bibles. This is what causes your content to load slower, your page jump more frequently and adds little to the aesthetic of the experience. Without even going into the topic of relevance and need for information, this is enough to have caused the rapid adoption of ad blockers, first on laptop and now on iOS.

According to a report from Pagefair on the adoption of ad blocking technology is exploding. Some quick facts from the report:

• Ad blocking estimated to cost publishers nearly $22 billion during 2015.
• There are now 198 million active adblock users around the world.
• Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months.
• US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.
• UK ad blocking grew by 82% to reach 12 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.

That’s before the adblock apps became available in the App Store. Less than 24 hours after the release of iOS 9, it’s interesting to see that adblockers shot to the top of the charts in the App Store worldwide.

The issue is not an easy one to grasp never mind solve. There has always been an implicit agreement between users and publishers: free or cheap content in return for eyeballs and hopefully attention. That business model is intricately built into a system. If consumers opt out of advertising (as they are in staggering rates not only with ad blockers but non advertising content options like Netflix and Spotify Premium) advertisers will no longer pay for space and seconds. Consequently, publishers and content providers will simply not be able to afford to provide quality content.

It’s a lose-lose situation that requires a new business model for publishers and the need for advertisers to innovate as to what communication means.

I can’t offer a new publishing business model quite yet, but I do have a strong opinion of how the notion of communication needs to evolve.

Content marketing designed to deliver value. Content marketing is not viral videos and cool platforms.

Good content marketing is a comprehensive and strategic system to communicate and deliver value to consumers.

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and coherent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action. The key word is “valuable”. It’s what changes this definition from one that could describe almost any form of advertising or marketing. You can tell if a piece of content could be part of a content marketing campaign if people seek it out, if people want to consume it, rather than avoiding it. The three pillars of a good content strategy, which in my eyes is the new definition of communications strategy, relies on three pillars:

• content that creates brand fame
• content designed to optimise and maximise engagement
• content with a strategic purpose of driving transactions in a relevant way

It’s basically the HERO, HUB, HELP YouTube model applied to video but I believe it’s relevance and strength goes far beyond video content. It’s for me the foundation of a new communication model that gives a purpose to ideas and executions and organises them in a strategic tool box. Thus, comms strategy becomes more than a collection of tactics.

When all three pillars are well defined and executed, they become an integrated communication ecosystem designed to deliver value, minimising the desire for consumers to run and switch off. But all this needs more imagination and creativity than blogs and videos. The above is simply a framework. The magic lies in the details and these will differ from brand to brand, objective to objective.

The marketing and publishing industries cannot be defined as being the creators of something people want to escape from. Never before has it been more important to be driven by the following thought from Smithery:

MAKE THINGS PEOPLE WANT RATHER THAN TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE WANT THINGS.

If you want to know more about unlearning of old advertising paradigms and how content marketing can help your brand stay relevant for consumers, feel free to get in touch with me or visit us at www.lhbs.com