Beyond Relevance

February 22nd, 2010 View Comments

Last week I attended a NextNY panel called “How to Make Advertising Not Suck” in a great space provided by Mike Dudda of Deutsch.

If you attend industry events and haven’t been to a NextNY meetup, I certainly recommend that you give it a try. You might need to buy your own drink, but it’s a great crowd and the community spirit along with the open conversational format make for a great experience.

So, how can digital advertising suck? Let me count the ways:

1) The ad can be totally irrelevant to the consumer who views it

2) It can fail to yield positive ROI for the brand

3) The advertising approach may not scale to the point at which it accomplishes meaningful business goals for the brand

4) The ad can go totally unnoticed by the consumer

5) It can intrude on the adjacent content experience the user sought out in the first place

I’ve listed the problems in descending order of importance to last weeks’ discussion.  Relevance and ROI, two deeply intertwined concerns, dominated the evening. Relevance is defined as the proper answer to the age-old advertising strategy question: “Who, What, When?” In the past 12 months, we as an industry have made tremendous strides in providing better answers to this question. Tech companies have built great new products, agencies have reworked their organizational structures to adopt these new technologies, and clients have literally “bought in.”

We still have a ways to go, however.

Event moderator and avid kayaker Charlie O’Donnell mentioned how recently he noticed a wetsuit sale on  fashion retail site Gilt Groupe. When he tried to buy the suit, it was sold out. Charlie has probably seen hundreds of display ads since his failed purchase attempt and not one of them had anything to do with wet suits.

The internet dropped the ball on that one.  Here is a man who wants to buy a wetsuit and surely there is someone who wants to sell him one. The ad industry should have been able to connect these two parties, ideally while subsidizing Charlie’s consumption of expensive, professionally produced content.  Every time a consumer expresses purchase intent online that isn’t satisfied, the brand/agency/publisher/tech ecosystem should react to fulfill that desire. The fact that we’re not taking a second shot at fulfilling every frustrated purchase attempt is a market, technology, and personal data rights management failure.  But looking at the roster of innovative companies working on this type of problem, I have no doubt that this failure will be corrected soon enough.

We’re going to achieve amazing levels of relevance that will benefit consumers and companies throughout the value chain .  But should we, as digital marketers, be so bold as to aspire to achieve more than entirely unprecedented relevance in advertising?  Yes.

Brands demand that we go beyond relevance. Online advertising doesn’t suck in general, but it does receive disproportionately small budgets relative to other mediums such as television.  One reason is that digital is very good at harvesting purchase intent for products sold online, but other mediums, like TV, are better suited for purchase intent generation.  Online is a great complement to other mediums.  Online advertising is good where TV fails (relevance, for example) and struggles where TV excels (emotional connection and narrative, for example).

Since online ads exist in a non-linear, non-interruptive, consumer-controlled medium, it is difficult for them to pass what I call the “Nick Drake test,” in honor of my favorite TV ad of all time, below. You can rename the test after the ad which speaks to you personally with the deepest level of meaning.

This ad is not harvesting purchase intent.  I wouldn’t even say that it directly generates purchase intent.  Instead, it accesses involuntary memory, aka Proustian memory, to create an emotional experience that I still remember 10 years after first seeing this ad as a teenager.  This ad certainly does not suck for the consumer, brand, or publisher.

To be sure, digital advertising, specifically conversational media, is entirely capable of creating emotional connections. To take a personal example, I was impressed when I tweeted about wanting a Kindle and Amazon replied with extremely relevant sales information.  But I was truly amazed when a human responded thoughtfully to my sarcastic reply to what I assumed was a Twitter-bot.  This advertising interaction delivered both relevance and a personal connection.  Once TV ads are digitally served, this fusion of digital relevance and analog emotion will become even more scalable.

To sum it up, online advertising currently delivers unprecedented relevance and its only going to get better.  Relevance is a big business, but for online advertising to deliver its full potential we have to look beyond relevance.

Here is the full list of requirements for advertising that totally does not suck:

1) Relevant
2) ROI positive
3) Scal able
4) Noticeable, but
5) Not intrusive
AND
6) Emotional

Many companies and individuals are now focused on numbers 1-3, and the winners will win big. But that is just one battle. The ability to pass the “the Nick Drake test” at scale will decide who wins the war.

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  • Author: Greg Hills
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