Ads: Entertain or Lose the Game
To the average GenZer and/or millennial, ads are tedious, seen as background noise, and provide a break in their TV show to scroll through Instagram for a few minutes. In fact, many younger people have installed AdBlocker apps on their web browsers to eliminate ads completely — the need for a social media break is not as strong as it maybe once was! Advertisements serve as a strong source of revenue for companies, and they fill the commercial gaps in TV programming that exist anyway. You may as well optimize them so that your users don’t grow entirely bored. Many streaming services provide a no ad subscription option, but if yours doesn’t, then you might need to think a little harder about how to ensure these ads aren’t a deterrent.
Remember in high school English class when you learned about Logos, Ethos, and Pathos? Well, it turns out that may have been a pretty important lesson after all. Ads that work are ads that evoke emotion in your viewers. Take the Doritos ads during the Super Bowl for example: funny, lighthearted, and are almost always guaranteed to make you smile. Or the Extra Gum ads? Where the boyfriend makes the girlfriend origami birds out of the gum wrappers, or the father watches his daughter go off to college? Those are gold star examples; seek those out, and use them.
Additionally, your users are used to multi-tasking like crazy, if you don’t capture their attention within a few seconds, then you run the risk of ruining the ad experience. A strong attention getter is crucial for an enjoyable ad experience; your users are not going to wait around for your ad to get better, they will simply skip over to the next tab while they wait for it to play out.
These two factors combined will be enough. What that means is, if your ads make viewers laugh, or they tug at the heart strings, and they do it fast enough to keep your viewers’ attention, it won’t really matter as much whether the product itself is one that your audience would be interested in.
Showcasing an entertaining ad is imperative in engaging your audience. Long gone are the ads where a salesperson speaks monotonically at the camera, forcing the audience to listen while they wait for their show to come back. Nowadays, if your audience is bored, they will leave. All you need to do to avoid that is grab their attention (fast!), and establish an entertaining story. With those two factors in play, your audience is sure to enjoy their ad journey.
Diana Gaspar is a co-creator of this article.
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