Enter the Advertising Void
Digital advertising is a lucrative industry. Worth $237 billion annually, advertisers now spend more on Google and Facebook than they do on TV. In fact, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, took more than $54 billion in ad revenue in the first six months of 2018.
Is it value for money? Not if you take into account the 30% of people in the US or 75% of younger millennials who have ad-blocked their way out of being reached. Methods such as ad-blockers, incognito mode on Google Chrome and Fluff Buster on Facebook make it pretty obvious that people aren’t OK with their data being used to sell them stuff. Once you take all those people out of the equation it leaves a sizably smaller demographic pool of consumers left to continuously get targeted.
Let’s be honest, no one is waiting with open arms. If you add up all the screens, devices, platforms and apps competing for attention at any moment in time it’s easy to understand why 86% of people have become “banner blind”, subconsciously skipping over or ignoring anything that feels like an ad. That includes banner and pop-up ads, as well as sponsored posts from social influencers — distractions that rarely have any relevance to the person’s online goal.
And yet, advertisers keep spending billions on over-saturated mediums where people simply aren’t paying attention. Even the people that look like they are paying attention could actually be click farms or bots — the reason advertisers lost $6.5 billion in 2017.
Life after advertising
People are fed up with ads because they have become too pervasive and too invasive. And they’re fed up with paid influencer promotions because they lack sincerity while pretending to be sincere, which makes the whole thing feel even worse. Generations coming of age today have learnt to treat information they read online with skepticism, so it’s hardly surprising their social appetite for truth is high.
People use platforms such as Amazon or TripAdvisor to search for honest opinions. According to Pricewaterhouse Cooper “80% of consumers look at online reviews before making major purchases and have a strong influence on the decisions people make.” The question is can they be sure those opinions really are honest? Fake reviews are not hard to buy and Amazon and other platforms have no real incentive to prevent them. Even if they purport to be cracking down on incentivized reviews, if they drive purchases does it really matter to the platform?
It’s not surprising that peer-to-peer recommendations are behind half of purchase decisions. Imagine if all those advertising dollars spent on high production, high polish content, were actually funneled into a marketing strategy that put the power into hands of consumers rather than agencies. What would the marketing industry look like if brands and advertisers stepped back and left people to spread word-of-mouth about products and services among one another?
What would that actually look like? No more banner ads for a start. No more retargeting ads following people around like lost puppies. No more influencers promoting products they have been paid to say they like without really even knowing whether they believe it themselves. Instead, opinions, experiences and information spreading from one person to the next. Yes that means having less control over the quality of content associated with brand products. Yes that also means having greater accountability to consumers who are unlikely to promote poor quality and ineffective products. And yes, that’s a bit scary.
Thanks to the invention of blockchain technology and digitally-scarce tokens, there might be a way to bring this to life. Blockchain enables people to share genuine product recommendations with one another with the reassurance that the recommendations have been quality-checked by other community members. Blockchain also enables the creation of a token reward system where the content creator won’t be driven solely by financial gain, but will nonetheless be rewarded for the value delivered to other consumers.
Brands need a new way to bring organic, word-of-mouth recommendations into their marketing mix in a measurable and scalable way. The people making the recommendations should be rewarded. Marketing needs to move to the blockchain.
The 2019 digital ad spend breakdown could look very different if brands stopped throwing money into the advertising void. The advertising industry needs to find a way to create authentic and trustworthy content, and blockchain technology might show the way.
