Modernizing Your Advertising Methods To Reach Today’s Consumers
At Xperiel, we’ve written a bit about the changing nature of today’s consumers. More and more they tend to reject traditional, one-way communication methods employed by the majority of today’s advertisers. This fundamental change has forced many marketers to think outside the box, trying to find new ways to reach this young, “millennial” audience. Their struggle has widely been in vain, as research indicates that spending on non-digital advertisements is shrinking as a result of traditional methods failing to resonate with consumers in their late 20’s — early 30’s. In fact, Comscore recently quantified that these new consumers have an attention span for ads that can be measured in seconds.
Some people have tried to blame the customer, claiming that millennials represent an entire generation with attention deficit disorder. One only had to look out the window in recent years to see that’s not true. Not long ago, the streets were literally filled with people playing Pokemon Go for hours. It turns out, these consumers have a nearly infinite attention span if offered the right format and right content.
It seems that the problem isn’t with the consumer; the problem is that unless the advertising industry modernizes, we’re going to see media effectiveness (and therefore spend) continue to drop. One way to modernize is to adopt (and adapt) the latest technology to create new channels that have the ability to make interacting with advertisements fun and relevant to the interests of today’s consumers. One of the technologies that does this, and allows users to connect with the world around them, is the internet of things (IoT).
It turns out that the IoT is more than just baby monitors and thermostats — it can also be a highly-effective advertising medium. This new IoT ad format is so much more powerful than all previous ones because it contains all the old formats as a proper subset, but goes further by connecting everything from billboards, to television and digital environments and making them much more valuable and compelling to the consumer. Advertisers can still deliver a powerful message, just as they’ve always done, but they can do so in a way that is personal, interactive, and pertinent — but far from intrusive — producing an immediately actionable event. Gamification plays a role here too, giving a more exciting and engaging experience to make the audience want to interact with ads.
Today, just about all ad formats are spam. Every commercial interrupts you from enjoying the show you’re watching. Every print magazine ad interrupts your reading. Every billboard interrupts your view. And the digital formats are even worse: emails, banner ads, videos, clicks, and pop-ups, whether online or on our mobile devices are literally the reason why the word ‘spam’ was invented.
IoT ads change all that. The native ad format of the IoT is experiential, and for the first time in 6,000 years of advertising history, brands and companies have the capacity to serve and delight consumers at scale. Instead of asking for your time and then wasting it, IoT ads can provide a real value exchange, whether it’s monetary (e.g., coupons, offers), digital (e.g., MP3 downloads), or entertaining (e.g., gamified experiences).
However, there’s still work to be done. One of the most difficult barriers to overcome is the question of cost. When it comes to creating enjoyable advertisements, expenses easily skyrocket at scale. Still, with poor advertising costing companies billions of dollars in expenses,
IoT advertising is inevitable. In fact, many forward-looking companies are already integrating it into their audience engagement strategies by partnering with innovative startups like Xperiel that can provide them with the tools needed to overcome barriers like cost and scale. For ways your company can do the same, connect with Xperiel on Twitter and via email here: https://xperiel.com/contact-us
