Co-Creating Digital Products That Delight With Global Brands 🤝 | Speaker, Founder & CEO | Leading POWER SHIFTER Digital & Trove | Serial Entrepreneur | Photographer, Noobie Knife Maker, Leather Crafter & AI Artist 🛸
In the 2000’s digital teams and agencies were the ugly ducklings in advertising that were misunderstood and constantly sidelined by the non-digital agency team members. So, in order to prove our relevance we hung our stupid hat on the click-through rate (CTR) for banner ads. I know, I was there and experienced first hand. I personally designed and art direct hundreds of banner ads, all with creative options for A/B testing. We are still suffering from that decision today. There are times when it’s critical in the buyer's journey like search, research, and DTC brands where you can order something easily and does not cost an arm and a leg, but I’d argue not much else. Major purchases are usually brand considerations, not snap decisions done in an instant click. It takes time to convert a buyer, and in the end that buyer either searches for the product, goes directly to the website, looks up a location to buy your product, or drives to the store with intent to buy, or buys by impulse while out shopping. (already with a buying mindset) Dollar Shave Club, one of the first big DTC brands, sold millions of razors because of their viral brand ad that brought attention, curiosity, and recall to men frustrated with paying outrageous prices for razors. Why are we still so fixated on the Click Through Rate as the holy grail of online advertising?
I once made a passionate plea in a big meeting with senior people to ignore Click through rates, and it went VERY well. I was chuffed. I'd prepared, I made charts showing ABSOLUTELY no correlation between CTR's and ANY business outcome for every category we worked on in the agency. I did a funny story about how if you look around your house, there probably isn't a single product you own, that you have ever clicked on an ad for ( this was before DTC DNVB's) I did a joke about how the political party we'd voted for, had somehow got our vote, without us interacting with their ads. I talked about trillions of dollars were spent on TV ads, despite not ever being clicked on, and what idiots we must be if they didn't worked. 40 mins in, and everyone was on the same page, how could we all be so daft. A new era in how to work was obviously upon us. We had a coffee break, a few people thanked me, people smiled, their was relief. The next item on the agenda was a monthly review of campaigns, where for 45 mins we went over how ads were doing, how the CTR's were, which ads performed best, what techniques could be used to increase them, which media was doing best, I looked around slyly, expecting some wry smiles, but people were transfixed, everyone was hotly debating what could be done, how can these numbers be increased, I was astonished. I'm not quite sure whats going on, but it does appear that people LOVE any numbers. Get one random number, divide it by another, stick in in a dashboard, tell people to make them go up, and a whole day can be spent optimizing against something made up, especially if it's precise. The entire world of digital marketing these days is about half a trillion dollars, the "best minds of a generation* " are working on how to get us to click on ads. In fact most tech platforms now routinely automate the CREATION of ads around one thing alone, not what looks premium, or what makes sense, on whats on brand, but what gets clicked on the most. It means most online ads look like dogshit, do NOTHING for brand building, but are happily served to botfarms and the 8% of people who click on 85% of ads, in search of reaching big numbers that mean nothing. While I'm stupid for thinking my logical passionate rant persuaded people, the reality is people need a better way. And to say " this obviously will improve branding, recall, look premium, do good things, seemingly won't trump "x went up to 0.0321% from 0.0273%" The take out from all of this is increasingly most people working in advertising have forgotten how ads work. For 99% of things we buy, they don't work by showing you something they know you want & you clicking on it. They work in 50 other brilliant, wonderful, magical, mysterious, indirect emotional & rational ways. At some point we have to wake up & have a more sensible and informed conversation about how to make better ads for digital screens & what KPI's to use * this is obviously not REMOTELY true.
Product designer
5moPeople loves numbers! And sadly it is hard to put a number on something that looks pretty/on brand!