__________can happen when a company runs the same commercial over and over again.
What cost has risen the most dramatically for U.S. businesses in the last 25 years? It’s not the cost of health care or taxes, or even executive compensation. It’s advertising, more precisely the cost of commanding consumer attention, which by my calculation has seen a staggering seven- to nine-fold increase in real terms since 1990. When demand outpaces supply, prices rise. Marketers’ demand for consumers’ attention has grown dramatically in recent years with the proliferation of new brands and products (remember when there was only one variety of Oreo?). The supply of attention, however, can (by and large) only grow with population growth. At the same time, consumers have been armed with all sorts of tools to avoid paying attention to advertisements, including DVRs, ad blockers, and mobile devices that allow them to shift their attention to content of their choosing. It’s a safe bet that the ad-to-sales ratios of major companies have risen accordingly in the same period, and the rising cost of capturing consumer attention has driven smaller companies without deep pockets to abandoning mass media advertising altogether, with promotions, discounts, and giveaways becoming their favored way to inform consumers about new products. In this ferociously competitive environment, companies need to know the best practices for capturing and retaining consumer attention. My research suggests that there is no universally applicable approach — what matters most is tailoring advertisements to the appropriate context. The positive side is that the amount of attention that consumers are likely to give to ads, regardless of brand or product, is quite predictable. For instance, people in the cinema tend to pay high attention to ads and trailers. On the other hand, media multitaskers — for example, people who watch TV with a computer in their lap — tend to pay less attention. If they are young and also have a mobile phone by their side, then they pay even less attention. Therefore, the best content for ads depends on the context in which viewers will be exposed to these ads, and the predicted level of attention that they are likely to provide. Here are four examples for video advertisements that have succeeded partially because they were used in the appropriate context.  Let’s look at these examples in more detail.
Advertising content needs to do two things — engage and persuade. Ads traditionally spent more time doing the latter — in the pre-internet era, the main way people accessed information about new products or brands was through TV advertisements, so they were willing to pay sustained attention to promotional or informational content. With the ubiquity of on-demand information, that’s no longer the case; in general today’s consumers will pay significantly more attention to content designed to entertain them. This holds true for B2B and B2C audiences alike. Insight Center
However, exceptions to this rule still exist. Consider a cinema, where consumers are relatively captive. They sit in a darkened room, leaving is inconvenient and they probably don’t have access to competing content (though even this is changing as norms against smart-phone use in cinemas deteriorate). In this context, advertisers can assume that their audience will pay full attention until the end of the commercial — so they can focus on persuasion and spend more of the ad time imparting product information. Consider the following commercial for Samsung: This ad does a terrific job of focusing on persuasion by showing the user experience with the product (a voice- and gesture-activated television), and in a meaningful environment, one if which the actor is also watching movies. While not devoid of entertaining content, it also doesn’t shy away from explaining exactly how the product is used, even narrating its benefits and prominently showing the brand.
Unlike cinema-goers, people who watch television have plenty of available alternatives. They can change the channel, pick up their smart phone, walk into the kitchen to have a snack, or even pause and then fast-forward through commercials. In an experiment over the internet, I played a subsample of 88 video ads for various food and beverage products — and told participants that they could skip any ad that they chose. I filmed the participants’ faces. Using an algorithm to measure their facial reaction, I was able to gauge the time and intensity of emotional engagement each ad elicited. I then asked participants in the study to buy a confectionary product, and was able to correlate their purchasing choices to how intensely each advertisement engaged their attention. The following ad for Pepsi, “Love Hurts,” resulted in the highest rate of sales conversion despite not being the most engaging. It’s an entertaining ad, and therefore it unsurprisingly outperformed ads that did not elicit a strong a reaction in my study participants, who often decided to skip such ads before they finished. But interestingly, it was not the most entertaining advertisement of the bunch, either. It turns out that if you make an ad too emotional sales will suffer — consumers focus on the content and don’t register the persuasive information. There is a sweet spot between too boring and too entertaining, and “Love Hurts” found it. Also, notice that the entertainment begins after the first reveal of the Pepsi Max brand. My research shows that entertainment presented after the first exposure of the brand always improves purchases while entertainment presented before the brand always diminishes it.
It’s a truism of advertising that good television ads grab their audience’s attention in the first five seconds. But sometimes your audience isn’t even watching your ad to begin with, so instead you need to capture their attention over the course of the ad — for instance, when a television is on in the background during the typically busy “early evening” time slots, when younger audiences make up the bulk of viewers (they are inveterate multitaskers), or when your advertisement will play in the middle of a “pod” of commercials. This advertisement for Target Australia managed to do just that. The music is inviting. The images are colorful. And the use of stop-motion animation makes it eye-catchingly disjointed and artsy. Eventually, the video draws you in. Notice how it waits until the very last second to provide information about the brand or product and, when it does, the information is minimal—the brand and url for Target. I examined the second-by-second web browsing of 100,000 households and found that immediately after this ad aired, the Target Australia website saw a spike in visitors of 30% percent in less than one minute, which was sustained for a full two minutes. And given that a typical ecommerce site such as Target has a 2 to 9% visitation-to-sales conversion rate, this spike translated into a quick and sizable return-on-investment.
There are some contexts in which an audience’s attention will be so divided that trying to capture it is a fool’s errand. Display advertising in Times Square in Manhattan is a good example — only already strong brands have a chance of making an impression in such a noisy environment, and it will likely be a weak one. In such instances, however, there may be solution — viral advertising, but not the standard way. Few categories have commercials that are as highly skipped as batteries. People are just not interested in what many perceive to be a commodity. Yet, Duracell managed to make a battery advertisement into a viral sensation with almost 16 million views on YouTube alone (12 million in just two weeks). My research shows just what a jackpot this was: less than 0.6% of video ads get 1 million or more total views on YouTube. The ad has a lot going against it. It starts slow. It shows the Duracell brand early on (after only 30 seconds!). And it stars Kevin Jorgeson, a mountainclimber unknown to most Americans. So how did Duracell do it? A viral ad can be “engineered” by reaching out to influencers, well-connected bloggers, internet personalities and opinion leaders to have them be the initial distributor to their online audiences. Obviously this has a cost relative to the “post and pray” of pure organic viral marketing. But the benefit is that these influencers start the “snowball” rolling. In effect, this approach transforms viral from earned media into a form of paid media. In the case of the Jorgeson ad, Duracell got the ad in the hands of mountain climbers and outdoors enthusiasts as a way to engage them to help distribute the video to their acquaintances and followers. Mountain climbing has a strong culture with trusted sources of expertise. If you receive a video shared from one of these influencers, chances are you will be more open to sitting through the 90 seconds, even after you see a Duracell brand a third of the way through. For advertising to work, it has to attract attention before it does anything else. That task is much more complicated and expensive than in past because people’s attention spans are shorter and more brands compete for attention. Today’s marketers must think in a two-step model: Entertain people to grab their attention; only then turn to your advertising needs by providing relevant information. Marketers should start their media buying strategy by understanding the attention potential of each media and context—only then will they know how much time and effort to spend on each step. Which of the following is the term for greasing the wheels or giving gifts for getting business from suppliers or customers?Greasing the wheels, paying the piper, mutual back-scratching, and other clever terms are all commonly used to describe the same corrupt act - bribery.
Which of the following terms refers to the concept that people tend to perceive an incomplete picture as complete?The principle of closure describes our tendency to perceive segmented visual elements as complete or whole objects, even when we're missing information. This principle is frequently associated with logo design, but it can influence other visual-design decisions related to icons and various page elements.
How can marketers use repetition to increase the likelihood that consumers will learn about their brand?How can marketers use repetition to increase the likelihood that consumers will learn about their brand? Many classic advertising campaigns consist of product slogans that have been repeated so many times that they are etched in consumers' minds.
Is a persuasive form of communication that informs people and motivates them to buy products and services?is a persuasive form of communication that informs people and motivates them to buy products and services. Promotion includes advertising; personal selling; public relations; publicity; word of mouth (viral marketing); and various sales promotion efforts, such as coupons, rebates, samples, and cents-off deals.
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