The Faded Color of Empty Words
My friend holyscapegoat posted some text from a fark.com discussion, and I was curious what your thoughts were on it. Agree or disagree or give me a ‘that’s interesting’, but share! Personally, I really identify with “You’ve got to have a message that matters.” I’ve always been very skeptical of advertising, though. Is our society actually changing?
Advertising isn’t working like it did a few years ago. You’ve noticed this, right?
Most advertisers are convinced that technology is to blame.
TV advertisers will tell you that TiVo and her sister Digital Video Recorders are blocking their television ads. But according to a recent report released by Leichtman Research Group, only 12 percent of American households own a DVR.
But TV ad results are down far more than 12 percent.
Radio advertisers will tell you that everyone is listening to iPods and satellite radio. But in truth, most of radio’s loss has been in the 12 to 17 year-old age group. These pre-adults are now spending only 51 quarter-hours per week listening to commercial radio, down from a zenith of 65 quarter-hours per week during the pre-Internet 80s and early 90s. The rest of us are listening about as much as we ever did. We wake up to radio alarm clocks and listen at work and in our cars. Overall, the audience for commercial radio has declined only about 4 percent over the past 3 years.
But Radio ad results are down far more than 4 percent.
Online news aggregators gather worldwide news for us and deliver it instantly to our desktops. Traditional Newspaper subscriptions are at an all-time low and so are Newspaper ad results. But the results are declining faster than subscriptions.
Yes, technology is to blame. But not in the way that you think.
I’m paid according to how much my clients grow, remember? So I don’t really care what the problem is. My job is to find it and fix it.
Here’s what I’ve discovered, tested and proved:
1: Internet surfing has trained us to disregard empty words.
2: Relevance has become more important than repetition.Bottom line: Meaningful messages are working better than ever, especially when the fundamental premise of your ad is clearly stated in the opening line. Ads full of unsupported claims and overworked “image-building” phrases are being rejected before they ever enter the brain. So say what matters. Say it tight, say it true.
The audience is still there. What’s gone is their willingness to pay attention to drivel.
You spend about a minute each day going though the mail delivered by the Post Office, right? Before Yahoo and Google came along, those 6 minutes each week constituted your total weekly exercise in the high-speed evaluation of content. But now you’re spending more than a quarter-hour per day scanning search engine results and web pages for relevant, meaningful, salient information. These daily quarter-hours are teaching you – and your customers – to more quickly recognize and disregard word-fluff and other irrelevant information. We’re learning to filter out hyperbole and empty phrases.
Is this beginning to make sense to you?
To make your advertising work like it should, you’re going to have to:
1. Talk about things your customer actually cares about.
2. Write your ads in a style that rings true.
3. Avoid heroic chest thumping. “We are the number one…” is now considered gauche and passé.
4. Close the loopholes in your ads. Offer evidence to support what you say.
5. Be specific. Details are more believable than generalities.
6. Deliver a real message. Substance is more important than style.Creativity and repetition can no longer cover up the fact that an advertiser has nothing to say. You’ve got to have a message that matters.
Do you?
Roy H. Williams
you know who has this down pat?
Movie Posters.
I know that TMNT is coming out 3/23/07,
Spiderman-3 5/4/7
Transformers 7/4/7
and hald the posters didn’t have the title of the movies on them, but merely the the icon/symbol….
Those are all major brands, though, and presumably (knowing, a little, the general interests of skennedy’s friends), brands you have a predisposition to, and interest in.
If it weren’t TMNT, Transformers, etc, but rather something unknown to you, represented with a symbol and a date, how much attention would you give it? Would it still stick with you?
I think that if the imagery was interesting enough, that it would inspire me to investigate further, which would then cause me to remember.
Now, if it looked boring or didn’t catch my eye at all….well, lets just say I don’t remember anything from Algebra II, except for the uproar over the prom queen getting a nose ring.
Is our society actually changing?
I think about how stirring rhetoric and flowery, influential language has shaped human history. Wars and peace have been made and broken by great speeches. Nations have been held together and broken apart by debate and argument. With the sheer volume of communication modern technology has brought into our lives, will such things be possible again?
Will this evolution of the human being with access to nearly infinite knowledge bring us together, bringing down a barrier, and removing the potent weapon of propaganda from truly evil men bent on oppression? Or will it atomize society into groups that no longer have the capability of truly communicating with or convincing each other?
I bet we’ll see which way the wind blows in our lifetime. It’ll be interesting.
i can dig it. it rings true, and i like the content, besides. apparantly that guy listens to his own advice. also, it’s exciting to think that we are like virii which become immune to antibiotics in that way. commercials could, in my mind, be likened to antibiotics as they’re both things that make their target less functional overall. commercials anger me when i can’t get their unsolicited jingles out of my head, and it’s a kind of gleeful think to think that they are losing on that proposition.
i still want to know what the non-sequiter spam is about, though.
I agree – I get angry when a company wastes my eyeball time by feeding me empty words, and it’s kind of pleasing to think that it’s becoming less effective on a mass scale, so much that they’ll have to do something more straightforward.
as for the spam, I’m guessing they’re used to identify which email addresses are valid, and which bounce. bounced email is dropped from spam lists, while email that doesn’t get a ‘rejected’ response is more valuable.
AFAIK, spam is based on a brute-force cost/benefit thingamajigger. Basically, If you send out one million emails, and three people buy your product, you’ve made enough profit to justify unsolicited email as a means of advertising.
More traditional means of advertising have a much higher cost, and therefore require far more product purchase to balance them out as profitable.
I loved reading this, and I think it’s absolutely true. I think it’s been true for a while, for a smaller portion of the population. It is only gaining notice as the numbers/evidence rise. I’ve tended to think that most advertising is ineffective unless very well targeted. On the other hand, if advertising is funny/entertaining/beautiful, instead of avoiding it, I pursue and share it! An example of this is the Sony Bravia ad. I watched that thing over and over and over in my free time.
The importance of intelligent marketing/advertising has been recognized before, producing the large number of firms that cater to such needs. I believe that a number of advertisers will continue with the “same old” techniques, perhaps because they are incapable of changing, and will produce poor results. Those who innovate as Mr. Williams suggest, will perform well and thrive. Consumers will benefit via advertising that delivers useful information, rather than wasting our time. That’s good news in my book.
I just realized that what I linked to was not the correct ad. The one I had in mind was the same singer (Jose Gonzalez), and ultra slow motion capture of millions of bouncy balls going down hills in San Francisco. It’s out there I’m sure, if you’re curious.
It’s here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IHOKw_lQZpY
And I agree with the OP. I think the ‘small margin’ of people who were unaffected by buzzwords and the like in commercials is growing and will grow still because of how we use the internet.
PS: Skennedy, I just noticed a picture in your background…the one with your head pulled over your shirt…aren’t you sitting on Leslie and wasn’t that picture taken on my Walnut st. front porch?
That is indeed correct.
Heeh. I’ve quite the eye. :D
I can totally agree with this, I used to work at an advertising firm. And while I was their IT guy and not involved directly in this craft, I did see enough to know that this is pretty much the deal now.
Spot on.
I read about the advertising and ‘trend’ stuff online at work. Of course, all that I can access is the propaganda from the place I work, but… Pay attention to the JCPenney ads in the coming weeks. It started during the Oscars, and will continue. Watch how the ads change, and then look at what Kholes and Target are doing, too. It’s sooo fascinating to see how those ads follow each other.
Those three stores are all competitors, and are currently no.1 Penney’s, no.2 Target, no.3 Khols. Target started the ad thing, Penney’s followed suit, and Khols is still not up there. Penney’s is going through a huge rebranding, too. “It’s all inside?” nope. “everyday matters.”
Penney’s has spent tons of money looking at what consumers want in the stores, and in the ads. So, yep. The ad exec quoted is spot on. It’s neat to me that the ads and stores are swinging to the ‘left’, so to speak.
I think that it is spot on, at least for many sectors of the population – there are so many “spam” ads this day and age that savvy computer users have gotten very adept at sorting through the chaff. It’s not going to be true for all members of a population, but I think the trend is headed that way for the younger generation especially.
And I agree with ummm….whoever it was that mentioned movie posters. What a great example, and one of the few I run into in my non-TV, non-radio life!
Totally fascinating. I’m going to be thinking about this for awhile, I can tell.
I think one of the ironies of the situation is that in attempting to preserve advertising revenue the companies involved have been one of the primary forces in making advertising revenue a more difficult thing to achieve. The more advertisers (and broadcast media) increase ad volume to try to shore up the decrease in sales resulting from ad time/space (and thus for broadcasters the devaluation of time/space for advertising), the more viewers learn to parse information and to raise the standard higher and higher for what advertising will actually attract their attention. I think the article is likely correct that as time goes on, the only reliable advertising revenue will come from targeted quality advertising. Other measures being taken such as trying to find new spaces to cram in advertising volume (such as mandatory ads on DVDs or product placement in video games) may offer some short term gain, but in the longer term I think their annoyance factor will probably give them an even shorter cycle of effectiveness than other placements in media.
What I’m more interested in seeing is the factors this will have on related business. Broadcast media reliant on ad space is likely going to have to radically restructure its revenue stream at some point in the future when it finally hits the bar where adding more advertisement space can’t offset the dropoff in consumer viewing. At that point, they’re stuck in a catch-22; business won’t pay more for advertising space than they’re likely to return in increased clientele, which if advertising space continues to devalue may not be enough to sustain the broadcast media. Whether this will result in a collapse of ad-reliant business media remains to be seen.
Well, I know that companies like mine (auto trade paper) make more money for their ad space specifically because it’s highly targeted (auto industry executives, media, and suppliers).
I’m interested in how content itself will change – the specialization of content. What that might mean, though, is that some demographics not considered key for anyone will get excluded … again.