Stop interrupting

21Dec09

Stop Interrupting

The last 80 years of advertising has been about interruption. Interruption of the music or conversation you listen to on the radio. Interruption of the program you watch on the television. Interruption of your view when traveling. And with the advent of pop-up ads online, interruption of the material you are viewing or reading online.

Occasionally advertising has engaged us, but that is the exception rather than the rule. Overwhelmingly advertisers try to interrupt us to gain our attention. Notice the screaming voice-overs, eye-popping graphics and loud music that leap out of your TV every ad break? That’s just more advertisers fighting for your attention.

Up until recently interruption has been reasonably effective too. There wasn’t a lot of media choice so we just endured the interruption and purchased enough of the products being advertised to justify the advertising expense. Interruption was the price of mass media.

Not any more.

Now we have unlimited options via a plethora of new media outlets. Digital radio, digital TV, subscription TV and the biggest channel of all…the Internet. And now technology has enabled us to choose what we want to watch / listen to / read whenever we want. We were so happy being interrupted that we have rushed to embrace timeshifting and downloading and podcasts in order to avoid it. And don’t even start trying to convince anyone under the age of 20 that they should be happy to pay the price of entertainment with interruption.

As the number of potential platforms increased, advertising has reached a state of extreme oversupply. Worse, there has been a steady loss of credibility of advertisements themselves, especially among young consumers.

Research by polling firm Colmar Brunton shows that seventy four per cent of people think there is too much advertising across all types of advertising media and sixty-five per cent of respondents find pop-up ads on websites to be “irritating”. A third of respondents consider ads on websites to be “irritating” and only a tenth find them “relevant”.

Another research firm, Ipsos Mackay, found that consumers “felt inundated with advertising” and are making increasing efforts to avoid or block it. There is a growing interest in ads that are tailored better to the interests of intended receivers rather than “interruption advertising”.

Unfortunately, the response of most advertisers has been to up the ante. More ads, more noise, more interruption to reach an increasingly fractured marketplace.

Bad news guys. Interruption’s not working as well any more, and it’s becoming less effective every year.

Its time to stop interrupting potential customers and start engaging them. The future of successful marketing is relevance.

Google has spent the last decade teaching your customers that they can find what they need with a few keystroke and clicks. Now consumers are demanding that the information they are delivered be more relevant than ever. Bing is responding with the promise of a more accurate search engine that delivers the results you really want.

This is great news for consumers but presents a significant threat to current marketing models that rely on interruption or duplicity. The public is going to increasing reward accurate, relevant information and increasingly ignore and resent irrelevant messages. This applies to all media.

That’s why in 2010 I believe that the smart marketer will begin spending a lot more time crafting relevant messages aimed at engaging their potential customer. They’ll begin buying their media in niche channels to reach a more targeted audience. They’ll re-think their online presence, dump the brochure style website and begin a dialogue. They’ll optimise and then deliver the information customers really want.

We’re about to enter the decade of inbound marketing, engagement and relevance.

Stop interrupting.

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