History of advertising, history of interference
Although, advertisers firmly believe that good creativity can change the user’s impression of an advertisement. The truth is that good advertising does move people and give brands appeal, but that happens in a characteristic scenario that is related to the user’s mood and state of being receptive to the ad at the time. The truth is that ad must put in 100% effort, avoiding the interference of the media environment and users’ evasion, and finally barely gaining maybe one percent of so little awareness. In order to deepen this awareness, ads pay excessively and have to do everything possible to make you see it, because there is no guarantee that you will see it all, so they have to keep repeating it, carrying out the so-called 360-degree marketing and surrounding you in all aspects. Moreover, those crude and eager ads are shown in the same place as good ads do also, which ruin the whole reputation of advertising and brings permanent infamy to it. The history of advertising is a history of interference.
Marc Pritchard has pointed out a problem, “people really hate to watch ads, especially in social media.” In the age of mobile Internet, it’s not improved even with precision ad placement. Clearly, no one is more worried than the advertising giant Facebook. Back in 2017, Facebook claimed that the “ad volume” on its pages, or the relative volume of ads to content, would struggle to sustainably drive revenue growth. David Weiner, Facebook’s chief financial officer, said, “The role of ad volume in driving revenue growth is expected to continue to decrease after mid-2017. Over the past two years, our average ad revenue growth has been approximately 50%. With ad volume contributing significantly less going forward, we expect to see a material decline in ad revenue growth rates.” In the following years, Facebook consistently cautioned the market that it would have difficulty maintaining high growth. The popularity of ad-blocking software also speaks volumes about how consumers are rejecting online advertising as it becomes more and more intrusive.
Forrester found that one-third of adult Web users in the U.S. use ad-blocking software and 48% of users try to avoid ads on Web sites. This brings up a perpetual game between brands and consumers. The more people avoid ads, the more pervasive they become. After avoiding TV, you can’t avoid the outdoors, and after outdoors, you can’t avoid mobile, life is a closed loop of advertising ecology. Pritchard finally realized that “the bottom line of advertising should be to not disturb users and make the advertising experience better for consumers.”
Therefore, we have to think about whether the advertising-based business model should become a thing of the past. Facebook, which monetizes internet content through display ads, has become the standard model in the industry, and almost all mobile internet products, including self-media, follow this content-first business model, which predestines advertising to be a perpetual cat-and-mouse game in which users are always passive. The passive acceptance of information is always discounted, which means that advertising is always inefficient. The most famous argument in advertising — and it was, is, and will be (if it doesn’t change) — is that half of my advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half. This is not just a waste of advertisers, this is also a waste of social resources, a waste of information consumption caused by information overload and failure to reach, and a mindless attack and exploitation of people.
So, if we can let users watch ads proactively, then we can surely say, a brand new world is coming.
The ads aren’t annoying, it’s the way they appear that’s annoying
No one would stop on the highway to see an ad, ads are not destinations, ads are inserted on your way to some destination, trying to impress you, to stimulate you for effect, they are then very large, their scale, as well as their design, seeks to affect your vision in a few seconds, they are not trees and landscapes on the road, which you would marvel at. You won’t admire an advertisement, while you are amazed by the landscape due to its natural properties, because an advertisement is a foreign object, an insertion, and interception, in fact, it’s the rude way you hate, not the advertisement. Of course, if the advertisement is to grab your attention, the content and design will inevitably be anxious, and it will even annoy you.
On a computer, ads are inserted throughout the interface; on a cell phone, in the information stream; plastered before, in the middle, and at the end of a movie; they pop up when you’re browsing content, and can’t even be turned off, or turned off and pop up again a moment later. They often pop up in the middle of the news you’re watching; they appear repeatedly in a long article you’re reading; they appear before and in the middle of a game, you’re about to play. You also keep seeing reminders associated with it: 5 seconds to close the ad, VIP de-advertising, a flash sale, buy it now, etc. Even worse, you can’t turn it off until you watch it in full.
Whether it’s a commercial, a billboard, or some other form of advertising, if it only appears once, you’ll barely get tired of it, and you’ll at most say something about a badly created and designed ad that’s ugly or silly. However, repetition is basically the law of communication in advertising, and studies have concluded that the same message is repeated more than seven times before it makes an impression, and in a crowded (many ads or messages) environment, advertisers have to repeat more. A popular military concept in marketing is called “saturation attack”, which brings indiscriminate and high-density advertising, where the same ad infests everyone in a grossly excessive way and repetition makes people oblivious, numb, and even angry. People ask the common sense question: What good does it do to know that repetition is annoying? For advertisers, the overload represents greed, anxiety, and insecurity, and when they don’t pitch enough, they are nervous and upset. However, their behavior ruins the reputation of advertising.
David Ogilvy says, “Ads are only offensive when they contain offensive content.” And now, it doesn’t matter if the content is good or bad, as long as it’s an ad, it’s offensive. So much so, that even the ads with the least ad-like content change your opinion as soon as they’re labeled ads, and you slide past them because it means inserting, intercepting, repeating, and peddling, but if you remove the ad label, you can’t help but click on the extremely large number of ads because they’re often brilliantly creative, seductive, mesmerizing, and inspire curiosity.
Open the 30-second app and watch a few ads, you will find that the ads are vivid, interesting, artistic, and spiritual. You will find that the ads are not annoying at all because there is no insertion, interception, or repetition in 30sec, and, when you click on an ad, you are active, and the initiative brings a very different experience and effect. If we can change the perception of people’s aversion to advertising, in short, change the way advertising “appears”, then good advertising will fundamentally rebuild the reputation of advertising, and people will love advertising.
Make passive advertising history
No one would say, “ I want to watch ads.”
No one has anything to do with watching ads except for professional needs, and even when there is a great deal of boredom to pass, no one would choose to pass it by watching ads, people would rather be dull than let ads fill in the blanks. The weird thing is that ads are everywhere, pervasive, filling in any position that can be filled. This is how advertising has been accompanied by annoying and repulsive notoriety since its invention. In the arrival or display of advertising, whether dynamic or static, people are passive, and this passivity constitutes the history of advertising.
In the article in the 21st Century Business Review — Winner Takes All in the Subscription Model Era — The End of the Internet Advertising Age, it was written, “Peter Feder, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, says that in the long run, our current advertising industry is long outdated, that it is a legacy of the old world, that advertising is the only way to pay for media, and that all advertising is doing now is undermining the user experience and the value of the brand.”
It is rare to find a treatise on this type of view. Now seems to be a special time, and this special is — no time to think, or rather, too late to think so that few people think. Many problems are therefore not problems, and many pain points are therefore not pain points. Continuous growth becomes the first element, growth is a carnival, and prosperity covers up the problems. Instead, Facebook, the advertising giant, realizes this, the more they grow, the more they worry. Facebook realizes that online advertising is not a good long-term strategy anymore.
Essentially, Facebook is dependent on user data to make money, and Apple’s data privacy strategy is bound to have an impact, even devastating, on all companies that rely on user data for their business models. Apple’s values dictate that Apple will have more aggressive user privacy policies to roll out, which makes Facebook uneasy. And with global data privacy awareness and legislation unstoppable, the day will come when the “Public Information and Advertising” business model will become a thing of the past. In an article titled Why Facebook is issuing digital currency Libra — the business model of global technology companies that profit from user data will be rewritten, by Lynn Yang, it is said that Facebook can use blockchain technology to “rightsize” users’ data, that is, to return the ownership of data to users, and then use the digital coin to “incentivize” users to upload their own data to feed advertisers, thus solving the privacy problem of user data. If this is done, the disruption is huge, but so far, there doesn’t seem to be any new further reports on this. By the way, the key is that this idea of Facebook is still based on the premise of maintaining the brilliant performance of its established business model, it is still the old way of feeding users to see more ads by all means. Just think, even if users contribute their personal data, it doesn’t mean that they actively look for ads to see, this is still technology-based problem-solving thinking, what if it is based on the brand? Well, this is almost impossible to appear on Facebook, they are engineers, not brand experts.
During Facebook’s display ad days, I’m sure Facebook didn’t just realize that this form of advertising was unsustainable, but also that it was backward and that it was no different than any other online ad, the difference being only that they appeared on the world’s largest social network. That didn’t change its poor experience, and when Zuckerberg thought of infomercials, it meant that Facebook had found the best solution for mobile apps, which are much more elegant than display ads. But it’s still interference, only based on user profiles, and in any case, it doesn’t change the passivity of users. Facebook must want to find a proactive solution. Although the outside world always thought that Google killed Yahoo and Facebook would kill Google, however, this is not the case, Google is still ahead of Facebook, and perhaps Zuckerberg knows it well that search ads are more advanced than infomercials.
The article Why Facebook is issuing digital currency Libra — the business model of global technology companies that profit from user data will be rewritten continues: “Forrester Research analyst Brigitte Majewski believes the age of advertising is coming to an end. Forrester found that one-third of adult Web users in the U.S. use ad-blocking software and 48 percent try to avoid ads on Web sites. 48% of users desperately avoid ads on websites. Marketers will choose the quality of ads over quantity. But that doesn’t mean any ads, but better ads. Marketers must also adapt to lower ad consumption, and companies must make new attempts.” It’s an enlightening view of better ads, fewer ads, more effective reach (this is not Facebook’s solution thinking, Facebook is “how to be more” thinking).
This all heralds a new paradigm that should arise, which is not subverting away advertising, but an innovation that should increase efficiency and reduce costs, which involves the efficient use of abstract information, which is energy-saving and environmentally friendly for the creative economy (a story being actively watched instead of being skipped and muted …… being interrupted is energy-consuming, and it leads advertisers to increase the repeated exposure of the ad; and not being watched is also environmentally unfriendly). Most critically, it has to be active — the user actively watches the ad — rather than the advertiser and the medium forcing them to — and that changes everything.
Whether it’s online or non-online advertising, good creative or bad creative, low-tech (like painting a wall), or innovative (programmatic buying), their commonality has always been unchanged: the passivity of the user. We thought technology would change this in online advertising, but it hasn’t. When you watch a YouTube news segment with ads inserted several times halfway through, read a long article on Twitter, when you encounter an opening in the text to put an ad, you realize that it’s no different than painting a giant advertising slogan on a wall in a village and that it’s just as violent, or even worse. Whenever the ads appear, you feel that these advanced technological media are not advanced at all. Technology is changing the world, technology is only embracing the medium and advertisers in the advertising ecology (gathering more users and giving data to advertisers), no technology will think about the comfort of users and the emotional effectiveness of advertising. Technology has not turned passivity into an initiative. And of course, it’s not a question of technology, it’s a question of to be or not to be, or rather, a question of to see or not to see, and their UX officers must say, “There’s no problem here.” Ever since the invention of advertising, “here” has been no problem.
As we all know, passive advertising has brought accumulated trauma, crushing placement, saturation attacks, precision placement, and programmatic buying, not only eroding the space and time of our lives, but advertising has become an overt act of violence. In the process of commodification, advertising breaks through the bottom line of respect for people, and over time, this becomes the norm to the point where it is not the problem. Ironically, in many cases, an ad that appeals to the humanity of a product appears to you in a very dehumanizing way. We proactively address the former (a good idea that is dedicatedly brought up, carefully crafted, and in every way possible for you to see), while actually, no one cares about the latter (the ad is exposed to you, whether you want it to be or not).
Because of passivity, advertising can only act on users’ unconsciousness. This mechanism of action has shaped advertising into a more conceptualized, brainwashed, and repetitive form, or rather, the development of advertising is more adapted to the laws of the media, for example, the compression of advertising duration due to huge launch fees. An advertising campaign is like a battle, after which there are ruins and smoke, just think of the Melatonin back then and NexOptic Technology Corp in recent years.
What if the user actively watches the ad? He is then conscious. Advertising messages in the unconscious leave only words, and undigested concepts, but advertising in the conscious is different, users can feel, and their emotions can be aroused. Boring facts, organized repetition, and conceptualized anti-intellectual, will trigger users’ shock, ridicule, and resistance, instead, the opportunity comes now, and brands can comfortably tell their stories.
