We hate it, but sometimes it works.
I am sick of seeing GoDaddy adverts, I don’t think I have seeing anything else but a GoDaddy advert for about a week now. I am pretty sure they are sneaking into my dreams.
Seeing this many adverts really makes me despise the company, in fact, I say I will go out of my way to avoid using them and I’ve heard a lot of my friends say the same. But, does this intense repetitive advertising actually work or are we all just becoming numb to it?
Say It Again
Ever heard of the old saying ‘if you start to hear something enough you will eventually believe it’? Well this is basically the whole premise of repetitive advertising.
The advertisers goal is to get in your unconscious mind, to really drill in their message. If I ask you to think about a place that sells burgers chances are you are thinking of McDonalds or Burger King, or perhaps you are one of the strange ones who goes to Wimpy… either way, this is because for years now all you have seen on every street corner or every television is one of these adverts.
Whether we like it or not, repetition will get in our heads if we see it enough, but what about when it goes wrong…
Thinking negatively about advertising
Now, since most of us are seeing these, frankly, awful adverts every time we try to watch the boy who yodels in Wall Mart (please watch it if you haven’t) on YouTube on our phones, it really is hard not to get pissed off with another GoDaddy advert.
But, advertising is different, we view the majority of all adverts we see on a mobile device. The problem is, our attention span is much shorter on these devices compared to watching the trailers at the start of a film or sitting in front of the TV. I, for one, know I try to race to click the ‘Skip Ad’ button before the person trying to sell me their digital course has stopped showing off their Lamborghini. However this is because of what our friends over at the National University of Singapore had to say.
“A high level of information richness in a mobile advertising creative not only decreases a user’s response to an ad, but also intensifies the negative effect of repeated ad exposure and physical avoidance.”
Making those content heavy adverts is what is driving people crazy. I bet you aren’t as pissed off by those nice Square Space adverts that have the nice Tardis sound and the moving pretty colours? Nope. Neither am I, sometimes I catch myself watching it till the end and I think ‘ Ha, that advertising didn’t even work on me, I enjoyed it and will never use Squarespace’. Yet, here I am…. blogging about them….
If you are going to repeat your advertising you have to change it up. Take SEM Rush or Wix for example. I have seen about 50 different variants of each advert, so as much as I am aware of them, I am not as annoyed about them and when it came around to buying a marketing tool…. Well let’s just say I am more than happy to generate a SEM Rush branded site audit for your business.
The science behind advertising
The short of it is, our brains are hard wired to remember things when they are repeated over and over again. Apparently it’s the magic rule of 7 which states we have to hear or see a message 7 times before it fully sinks in and is taken into our long term memory. Once there, the advertisers have succeeded, almost! Advertising is not slowing down, in fact it’s ramping up, massively.
We are seeing an average growth of around $50,000,000,000 every single year in digital ad spend.
With advertising getting easier to carry out and there being more adverts than ever, you better believe that there are some that are working and some that are failing.
It is getting harder than ever to advertise effectively, you have to understand your audience, have the correct tone and messaging and even take into consideration where on the internet your adverts are going to be seen and tailor the creative to them, so you can get the outcome of Squarespace and not Go Daddy.
Talk to us today about advertising your brand in the right way: 020 7459 4768
(Sponsored by Go Daddy…)
