Hey Marketer! Your Ads Are Junk And Everybody Hates Them.
Yes, I said it. Your ads suck — and so do the ads of everyone else.
Ads are basically the garbage of the digital sphere. They are the nasty cockroaches creeping out from every corner of your screen on your phone and laptop, rudely interrupting your entertainment experience and following you around the internet like some psychopath stalkers you can’t get a restraining order for. We use a lot of effort to minimize our time watching ads and even avoiding them altogether — without ever fully succeeding in it.
Last week, the hype was definitely real around the new social media platform called Vero. Although Vero has in fact been around since 2015, it wasn’t until last week that the app surged to popularity and was suddenly downloaded more than a million times in just a few days. Everyone was buzzing about the newcomer, and major celebrities began urging their followers on Instagram and Snapchat to follow go and them on Vero.
What makes Vero so appealing
What distinguishes Vero from other social media apps is its promise of an ad free experience. No bots, no algorithms, no suggested content. Only yourcontent and the content of the people you follow. In the order it was originally shared. The ad free experience is enabled by Vero’s subscription based business model, where no ad revenue is needed.
When looking at the business models of some of today’s most successful entertainment providers, it comes as no surprise that Vero skyrocketed to fame and fortune by providing an ad free experience. Spotify allows you to listen to music without ads for a monthly fee, Netflix allows you to watch movies and TV without ads for a monthly fee and even YouTube has rolled out its subscription based version without ads. On top of this, studies suggest that one fifth of millennials use ad blockers on their browsers and the number is constantly rising.
You can’t win with quality
Most content marketing agencies, miscellaneous social media experts and the representatives of companies whose revenue in one way or another derives from digital ad spend have for long tried to insist that with the rise of ad clutter, marketers just need to invest more in the quality of their advertising.
This argument may have been sound at a time when people still hung around the platforms with ads in the first place. A well thought-out, insightful and beautifully crafted ad may really have stood out from the sea of crap and achieved its KPIs.
“the problem with the strategy of emphasizing quality is that only so few advertisers have chosen it.”
However, the problem with the strategy of emphasizing quality is that only so few advertisers have chosen it. Most ads are still bad, really bad. And a few gems in a constantly expanding pool of trash will not be enough to convince consumers to stay with the free version of a service when there is an ad free option available. Inexorably, consumers will start to migrate away from the ad furnished services towards greener fields with no ads at all.
Salvation
So what can brands do in this dreadful situation? Invest 100 % of their marketing budget in outdoor advertising? Stop advertising altogether? Cease all operations and file for bankruptcy?
Take it easy cowboy, no need to be so dramatic. The road to salvation is paved with existing ingredients: service design, customer experience and branding. In an ad free world, the winner is not the one who shouts the loudest or the one with the funniest puns in their Instagram captions.
No, it is the one with the best product, the best service and the best brand.Instead of fixing their flaws with advertising, brands need to take a good look in the mirror and say to themselves slowly and clearly: My product isn’t selling because nobody cares a dime about it.
Repeat a few times, just to make sure it really sinks in.
“Just like people, brands need to do something interesting in order to become interesting.”
Future marketing calls for an even closer look at each P of the marketing mix. Above all, it calls for a whole new role for brands as corporate citizens with distinguished personalities and voices. Just like people, brands need to dosomething interesting in order to become interesting. They need to have opinions and take stance. They need to have flaws; to be humane.
Brands need to break themselves into pop culture and start telling stories that people find worth talking about, worth remembering and worth retelling to others. Just like the most interesting and successful people do.
And yes, arguably some people have become famous without any real merit whatsoever, just by getting enough media exposure. But ask yourself: do you really want to be the Kim Kardashian of brands?
Honey, you can do better than that. So when you are ready to build your company a culturally relevant brand, contact us at at NORD DDB. Breaking brands into pop culture is our jam.
By
Minttu Aarniovuori
Creative
