People don't remember ecosystems, they remember how ideas made them feel.
Author: Rory MacRobert, executive creative director: digital at M+C Saatchi Abel
Have you seen the Star Wars prequels? Remember the climactic fight scene by the lava river (I swear this is relevant) where Obi Wan forlornly cries out “You were supposed to be the chosen one!” to Annakin?
It’s kind of how I feel about the state of the digital advertising industry right about now – digital was meant to give us more ways to make better ads. Instead, it seems to have given us more ways to make more… meh.
If you’re like me, you probably spend a good few hours of your day online - working, scrolling, reading and streaming, and like me you probably can’t fondly recall a single digital advert you’ve seen in the past 24 hours. Which is odd, isn’t it, considering we see an absolute avalanche of them each and every day.
Theoretically we should be living in an advertiser’s paradise - we have direct round-the-clock access to our customers, we can track their interests and target accordingly, we can insert our campaigns into most of their digital habitats. And yet, every day the industry wakes up to the same sobering truth – up to 80% of all digital advertising goes unseen.
Now, before the CFOs have a collective aneurism, let’s back up and see how we got here.
As it evolved, digital promised us a brave new world. We could build communities, create ecosystems, tell stories over time and transform audiences into engaged participants. Compared to the 30-second TV spot, it felt limitless.
And because this was all possible, we all naturally assumed it was necessary. More must be better than less, right? So, the industry went out and built increasingly elaborate campaign architectures. Hero films give birth to packed content calendars, which branch off into creator partnerships, before leading to social activations that are fuelled by user-generated content.
Piled on top of all this are the ever-growing demands placed on a single campaign. Product education. Brand lift. Conversion. Community building. Loyalty. We ask digital campaigns to do more than ever before.
Where things start to get unstuck is how thinly this spreads the marketing budget. The absolute abundance of platforms, multiplied by the desire to run always-on digital campaigns, exploded by the continual refreshing of executions means the output is not so much a campaign of adverts anymore, but rather an extensive monotony of uninteresting messages.
The problem here of course is that our consumers are so busy scrolling they never got the memo telling them they should care. Just look at the data - Karen Nelson-Field's research shows that in a world of scrolling, skipping and multitasking, most advertising has only seconds to hook someone’s attention. A few years ago, it was three seconds, nowadays it’s more like two. The majority of consumers are not sitting around waiting for the next instalment of a campaign; they're trying to get through a Monday filled with emails that are not finding them well.
In a cruel twist of irony, technology has made it easier than ever to reach people, while at the same time, it has made it easier than ever to be ignored in the sea-of-sameness. And the knee-jerk response? More. More content, more channels, more touchpoints, more executions.
But every additional execution receives a smaller share of attention.
Perhaps this is why so much of modern marketing feels strangely invisible. We’ve become so obsessed with saying more we’ve just ended up saying it worse.
Take yourself as a study of one and pay attention to what you watch and read online and what you don’t. How much of what you ignore is of low value to you? I’d wager all of it.
The brands that leave a mark don't win because they created the most touchpoints, they win because they created something memorable enough to stand out amongst the noise. At the end of the day, when someone’s entire exposure to a campaign is that solitary Reel they watch while waiting for their Uber...that Reel needs to shoot the proverbial lights out.
So, instead of making more, shouldn't we be making less, but make it do so much more?
