Why do ‘we’ hate advertising?
Do you hate advertising???
Today, advertising is everywhere. We probably see ads, more than we see anything in our daily life. Even if we are not outside, advertising has penetrated so deep within our lifestyles, that we see nearly 6000 to 10000 ads per day. Back in 2007, the market research firm Yankelovich estimated that the average person saw up to 5,000 ads per day, and after surveying 4,110 people, half of them said that advertising was “out of control”. Today, in 2021, with the explosion in the online advertising industry, an average person watches twice as many ads as that of 2007. We know the reason behind it being average people spending more time online for their entertainments, information and applications. You can always find out more about it by following the work of Ron Marshall, a popular marketing expert who ran a crazy experiment to find out how many ads he was exposed to during a typical day. He decided to spot as many ads as possible and count them in 24 hours. To cut short, he counted 487 ad messages before even finishing his breakfast. He was so shocked and amazed, he decided not to continue.
Spending our time attentively looking(hearing) at something is what advertisers and advertising agencies are looking for. As expected, just like newspaper/magazines, radios and TV/Cinema, “INTERNET” was filled with advertising. There are more than ten ways to expose advertising to any audience while he/she is online. So to summarize, an average person spends a significant amount of his time on advertising, without them getting any incentives for spending their time. Today, advertising has become so cheap that we see the same messages over and over again, designed to make them look different to attract a broader segment of audience attention. But once the irony is, the advertising sphere is so cluttered and congested that we are exposed to the same messages over and over again. That’s why we hate advertising. When advertising interrupts us while we are in our trance of entertainment or when we are trying to get some information or using some tools to get things done, it frustrates us. Consumers need advertising for their information about any product/service/brand, and every consumer is an audience to the advertising, but not every audience of any advertising can be a consumer to every product/service/brand being advertised. That’s where advertising is seen as an evil when it considers(ideally) each of its advertising audiences as its consumers.
In our society, consumerism is seen as unnecessary spending which is promoted by advertising. But in reality, if it was not for advertising, people would never know about some of the product/service/brand use cases and applications. Advertising gives us options and initial information about the solutions to our particular problems. Like when Fevicol, synthetic adhesives by Pidilite were launched, way back in the early 2000s, they spent heavily on advertising and were criticized for spending on advertising to consumer audiences as Fevicol was seen more like an industrial adhesive. It was a masterstroke from Pidilite from by marketing point of view as they were creating a base for their next product Feviquick, which was more intended for the consumer market, from the audience perspective, it also paid off to watch those ads and get the idea of using Fevicol and Feviquick in our daily life. Although Fevicol was an industrial adhesive, I clearly remember using Fevicol as an adhesive in school projects, home and while playing, not only by me but from the other people around me also. In our case, we watched the ads on TVs at that time and advertising helped us to use Fevicol as it was never intended for. I can give you more such examples but I think I had made my point by now. So we can’t say that advertising is not necessary for us. So what’s the solution?
The answer lies in finding more audience-oriented advertising solutions. Audiences are the building block of any advertising campaign. If there is no audience, advertisers and agencies will have no one to advertise to. That’s what happened with the outdoor advertising industry during the covid-lockdown worldwide. But still, advertising flourished while the traditional advertising industry/fraternity suffered and looked for ways to get to the audience, online advertising exploded into exposing more ads than ever. The players changed, the game remained the same and audiences, well audiences are still trying to skip advertising. With many tools online available, most of the adverts are skipped and ignored making them useless as well as the time, efforts and money spent on creating them. So to cut short again, in the present scenario, the audience hates advertising and want to skip it as much as they can, advertisers are looking to exploit any audience attention they can get their hands on for their advertising and agencies are suffering because of the big-internet tech. giants who are continuously squeezing out the revenue share from their part of the pie-chart, even without labeling them as an advertising agency or being a part of the traditional advertising fraternity. To tackle all of this, we are proposing an incentive-based advertising ecosystem that incentivizes the audience for its attention, agencies for its advertising assets and advertisers for its product/services. Our ecosystem is based on the idea that even attention requires effort and if someone is making an effort, incentives promote him/her to make more efforts. If advertisers are incentivized if an audience consumes any information from any content created by them, that provides relevant and true information about any particular brand’s product/service, agencies are incentivized for exposing the content created by the advertisers to their audiences and, most importantly, audiences are incentivized for giving their attention to the content created by the advertisers through the advertising agencies’ channels, it would promote them to engage more with each other. And as creativity and content authenticity is the first step in this kind of engagement, it would promote a positive effect of consumerism and advertising. If an audience likes the advertising content and interacts with it and uses the product/service offered in the advertising, everybody is rewarded the advertising circuit is complete. If an audience doesn’t interact with the content, he is incentivized for this attention that he gave to the advertising content. Which will encourage him to interact more with other advertising contents.
Seems absurd? It is. Because from the beginning, advertising was thought of as a mean to broadcast information to the masses in the public. Whether it be papyrus in ancient Egypt, graffitis in the Roman Empire, statues, seals, paintings and plays in the Renaissance era, newspaper, billboards and outdoor wall paintings of the industrial age or the radio, and TV advertisement of the late 20th century, advertising was always supposed to be in the public, for the public, by the public. But with the growing internet and information age, advertising has become more personal, targeted, cluttered, over-intruding, disturbing, centralized, unreliable and boring, which makes us hate advertising. We, as an audience, don’t hate advertising because we have to watch them, we hate them because we have to watch them unnecessarily, without our permission, without any gain. Advertising is always going to be here. Whether we want it on not we have to watch advertising, it’s better to watch where you can have your options.
Stay tuned for a new Social Advertising Platform that incentivizes its user for every interaction that they make. It’s time to raise the blinds…
