Invisible Ads and The Efficiency Bubble

Do you remember an advertising message from yesterday? The average person gets about 4,000 advertising messages per day. At best, we might remember one or two. Even if we remember the ad, we probably don't recall the brand or are persuaded to buy the product. This situation has created a big problem for anyone who is trying to promote his/her business. It also means the disruption of the US $83 billion digital ad industry just in the USA alone. Why is this happening, and what can we do to about it?

Why do we have invisible ads? Looking beyond the obvious answer, people hate ads.

According to Dave Trott, advertising, at its very core, has three goals: impact, communicate, and persuade. Impacting is getting noticed. Communicating is articulating the brand value proposition. Persuading is getting people to take action. Most of the advertising fails to get noticed.

One core problem is the de-riskification of the industry, which has a lot to do with data. We have used data to make advertising more tolerable but not more impactful. We keep fishing where everyone is fishing (e.g., social media and Google Search) and doing what everyone is doing to mitigate the risks and make advertising suck less. We also have bought into the promise that brands need to be always on, so we are trying to produce more content, more targeted, and faster.

This model of speed and precision, however, has yet to make advertising more visible. While advertising is more tolerable in FB, and Google than display banners, we still don't remember advertising from yesterday. We have just developed an Ad immune system to shield us against targeted Ads. We have created an efficiency bubble. We develop Ads for the right people, at the right time, on the right channel that no one remembers.

This efficiency bubble has created a devastating effect in the Ad industry. The reality is that you don't need an Ad agency to play an efficiency game. In fact, you are better off doing it in-house in most cases. If you decide to go with an Ad agency, you don't need to pay a premium for efficiency ideas. Why should you? You can hire freelancers to do it done at 1/3 of the cost. The big winners in the efficiency game have been Google and FB, which has taken 80% of the digital Ads' dollars.

What can we do to make advertising visible? Bursting the Efficiency Bubble

If we look at the ads that we remember, they all have one fundamental goal, which is to create impact. They dare to do something that makes us uncomfortable and challenge the convention. They play in this grey line between what is and what is not acceptable in our society. They, however, come with a risk for any brand. People are going to talk about it positively or negatively, but they are going to remember.

Think about Fearless Girl doing the unthinkable, which is to challenge the Wall Street's bull; the Burger King hacking of Google Home, which got them in trouble with Google; Marc Ecko's grainy footage of what appeared to be a graffiti artist jumping over a fence at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and tagging one of the engines on Air Force One with the words "Still Free."

None of these examples are big campaigns with big ad budgets. They are "extreme ideas" that play in the red zone of culture, not the safe one. They tend to be earned first, not paid first. They focus on actions, not attitudes. To quote Adam Ferrier, actions change attitudes faster than attitudes change actions. They communicate through people and not through corporations as trust travels horizontally, not vertically.

Bursting the efficiency bubble means playing with risks. The riskier the ad, the more significant the upside. This is not different from investing in the stock market. In finance, we use data to calculate the potential risk and return of our decisions. Perhaps, it is time to rethink data in advertising and use it to help burst the efficiency bubble.