If you believe that attention is valuable currency in today’s world, then advertisements that force themselves on our attention are like people stealing money from our pockets.
Interrupt-driven advertising or marketing is becoming less effective as we find ways of ignoring the messages that don’t interest us. As a business model, interrupt-driven advertising is fading fast. And when advertisers insist on our attention – whether by raising a volume level, disabling fast-forwarding, or other schemes – it can work against the brand image they’re trying to project.
“The web visitor only has to look at the image for 10 seconds before they can click through,” says the advertiser. “We really need the leads, so we have to ask them to fill out a form first,” says the marketer.
The seconds spent on uninvited interruptions are taking our precious attention. If we don’t feel that we received something of value in return, we’ll simply resent the brand.
The talking campaign mailer
Anyone who says thinks print advertising is dead clearly doesn’t work for a political campaign. The number of mailers arriving at our household this campaign cycle was overwhelming.
Aside from its environmental implications, direct mail is a less offensive form of advertising, because you can decide whether to read or recycle at your own pace.
But one campaign earned my resentment by including a recorded speech on a sound disk in the printed mailer. When I opened the piece, a voice started exhorting me about the candidate’s qualities and positions.
From my perspective, that’s on par with a robo-call – and we all know how much we love those. I felt like my attention had forcibly taken from me by the mailer. (Plus, to recycle it we had to strip out the recording device first.) The speech didn’t deliver any information I could not read elsewhere, including on the mailer, nor was I willing to spend the time to listen to it. It had no value to me beyond annoyance.
I was an undecided voter on this local issue, and the mailer made me question the candidate’s good judgment.
The essential practice of content marketing is to consider the message from the audience perspective. If we, as marketers, create content that delivers value in the eyes of our customers, then they will gladly spend their attention on it.
Anne Janzer 