26 November 2019

People hate ads.

*The following post is about advertising to baby boomers.

A shocking research report featured in The New York Times:

The Advertising Industry Has a Problem: People Hate Ads
By Tiffany Hsu

… The advertising industry faces an “existential need for change,” according to a blunt report published on Monday by the research firm Forrester. Now the agencies must “disassemble what remains of their outmoded model” or risk “falling further into irrelevance,” the report concludes.
And there are various surveys from multiple sources to back this up:



Scary!  Except … I forgot to add the dates of these surveys:



Most of the above statistics are from The Mirror Makers by Stephen Fox:
image

So not much has changed. Or maybe a lot has changed.  Nowadays:
… As advertisers bombard consumers across platforms like Twitch, Facebook, television, billboards and more, consumers are trying to get away, signing up for ad blockers and subscription services …
The truth is messier. Few people admit to enjoying ads. In the olden days, advertising on radio and television was often tastelessly intertwined. Today (or maybe it was ten years ago, it’s hard to keep up) we would call this Madison & Vine or Product Placement or Native Advertising or Stealth Advertising. There were complaints, and things changed. By the late 1950s, you listened to/watched a program – then came the commercial breaks. This technique is still effective today.

Most people don’t mind and many even like advertising - if it’s positioned as such, doesn’t constantly bombard you.  I wrote about this years ago:
06 March 2012
Digital Distractions

Advertisers are getting wise to the drawbacks of marketing in the digital nest … The more people use smartphones, the less they’ll tolerate silly graphical doodads mucking up their small screens.
Back to the NYT article:
… Agencies must “disassemble what remains of their outmoded model” or risk “falling further into irrelevance,” the report concludes …

The “outmoded model” happened when the internet exploded – and the industry became greedy. With greed came all this and this and this:

Digital Ad Shenanigans
It’s been a bad week or so for online advertising foolishness and chicanery.

Black Ops Advertising by Mara Einstein
Rolling on the floor laughing  What a wacky virtual world we live in!  Streams of prose, pictures, videos, all not what they seem.  Alice in Wonderland, by comparison, is rather prosaic.

Follow this crazy guy if you want to know more:

The Ad Contrarian



*The link below is to a silly piece about advertising to baby boomers:

Should older people be allowed to change their age?
by Chuck Nyren
Nov 4 · 2 min read