DON’T BAIT ME, BRO: How Advertisers Should Adapt to the Anti-Clickbait Movement

Power in the marketplace has been shifting from a top-down model to a bottom-up one, in which the consumers are now holding the majority of the power. With the amount of competition growing, consumers now have greater control over which brands succeed, rather than having limited options and being forced into supporting a brand simply because it’s one of the only ones available. This shift of power has held advertisers to a new level of accountability, since this means that advertising is no longer simply about plugging your brand, but providing with some sort of value to the consumer to actually attract and hold their attention.

Clickbait serves as a great way to grab consumers’ attention, but it certainly does not to the job of holding it. On top of this, consumers will also lose all trust for the brand when they learn that it does not actually provide what they were expecting based on the misleading information which led them to be baited into clicking on something. While gaining the attention is great for an advertiser, losing the trust of the consumer is a definite no-no in the game of marketing. Consumers also hold a large amount of power in the aspect that their online reviews can make or break a brand, as the market will generally trust the word of their fellow consumers over the profit-hungry words of any advertiser.

I often find myself searching up reviews for a product and its company whenever I see an advertisement which seems just a bit too good to be true. The same thing is true with YouTube videos as well — If I don’t see a good enough rating on the video, chances are I’m being fleeced and I won’t actually enjoy the content. I’m always weary and suspicious of these seemingly amazing deals or interesting articles, since I usually expect that these advertisements only want to pull me in by deception. In the cases of where I’ve found advertisements for incredibly interesting articles on Facebook which turn out to be poorly written with no fact checking, I’ve lost all interest in ever viewing from that site again. Instant ignore. The same thing is true with misleading YouTube videos — Instant ignore.

This leads me to how advertisers should be adapting in order to appease the anti-clickbait movement. The method for adaptation is extremely simple: be straightforward and honest with your advertisements, because you want your consumers to actually trust you! Communication and transparency go a long way in this world, especially when there are so many brands to choose from. While clickbait can help an advertiser raise their view counts (and probably get a bit of monetization from that), is it really worth it when the consumers don’t like what they’re consuming — or even worse, if they start hating the brand? NO!!! Advertisers should be putting their money where their mouth is and providing what they say they are going to provide in the thumbnail of their advertisement.

While I’m sure this doesn’t apply to all consumers who browse the Internet, and there are probably many people who still get enjoyment out of reading a poorly written list of “10 ways to guarantee X”, the majority of us would like something real and authentic. Advertisers who want to succeed will realize this, and hopefully one day we’ll have an online world where the advertisements actually display the true content for whatever is being advertised (haha, very funny…but I can still dream, right?).