Ads Must Deliver Value to be Successful
Here at Spaceback, we often reference the wise words of Howard Luck: “People don’t read ads. People read what interest’s them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” When Howard Luck said this, the only way to deal with uninteresting ads was simply to ignore them. As such, marketers began to incorporate flashy design, catchy jingles and disruptive experiences ad nauseam to make it more difficult for people to ignore. For the most part, these techniques worked: it’s hard to ignore something that is distracting. Most of us can’t even think the phrase “I’m loving it” without the accompanied melodic flare coming to mind. The jingle isn’t all that interesting, but it was effective marketing (no matter how annoying).
Today, people have an option that didn’t exist in the mad men era: to block ads entirely! Undesirable ad experiences better drive the adoption of ad blockers than marketer ROI. One bad experience has the potential to break the value exchange forever. Given the risk, you’d think marketers would take more care.
In the age of ad blocking, people have a choice to see ads or not see ads. Advertising can only remain a valid revenue stream if audiences choose to see ads, and audiences will only choose to see ads when there is value in it for them.
The good news is that it’s much easier to create ads that deliver value than to convince people that they should put up with annoying ads so that they fulfill their roll in a flawed but necessary value exchange to access free content… huh? Exactly…
What makes an ad valuable?
Ads deliver value when they provide entertainment, useful information, or illicit an emotional response. The fundamental problem is that what is useful/entertaining/inspirational to one person can be annoying/distracting/frustrating to another. There is no way for a marketer to know in advance how an individual will respond. Advertisers invest heavily in market research and targeting data in an attempt to reach the right audiences, but the individual is far removed from this transactional process.
The best indicator of whether or not someone will be interested, is whether or not that person thinks they will be interested.
Instagram users can see anything they want in their Instagram feed, yet still over 80% of them follow brands! Should a brand post content that is more distracting than valuable, users can easily unfollow. To avoid this, brands take great care in delivering curated experiences to their Instagram followers.
Instagram has built a massive advertising platform based on the premise that no ad is delivered without a pre-existing relationship, but there is no reason that this strategy must be siloed to the social experience: Spaceback makes it easy for marketers to directly own this relationship and deliver valuable ads anywhere audiences might be. Building and respecting relationships is the key to making ads more valuable.
