As the digital ecosystem becomes increasingly cluttered, consumer receptivity to advertising is at “huge risk”, industry has heard, with brands being the root cause.
Speaking at Magnetic’s inaugural Spark event on Thursday, Millward Brown’s executive vice president of global brands, Sue Elms, accused advertisers of pumping out their own version of CO2 into the advertising space – and turning consumers off in the process.
“Consumer receptivity to advertising is our most precious asset – it’s like our oxygen,” Elms said. “But our behaviours as an industry have been more bad than good and we’re turning people off.
“It’s like we’re pumping out our own version of CO2 into the atmosphere and we’re destroying the environment. People are becoming less receptive to advertising and it’s our fault – and that’s the inconvenient truth.”
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For Elms “CO2” translates as an unsustainable increase in advertising clutter, which she says is a product of the vast amount of digital inventory available. However, the temptation for brands to cut through the noise too frequently, in too compressed a time period, Elms says, can actually do more damage than good.
“It’s getting harder to be heard, and there’s no doubt about that, but the answer is not to shout louder, nor is it to shout more often.
“The natural reaction when someone isn’t responding is to try again and again, with more persuasive messaging, in more places, where you can be more relevant, until we’ve got them trapped and are literally forcing our advertising upon them.”
In 2014, the average click-through rate was at an alarmingly low 0.07%, signposting a despondency and frustration among consumers who are in turn increasingly rejecting online ads with ad-blockers.
According to data from Kantar TGI, 33% of Brits say that ads are a waste of their time – up 20% year on year – while it is estimated that approximately 15% of the UK’s online population use an ad-blocker.
However, Elms, whose media career spans more than three decades, said that the rise of ad-blocking could be seen as a positive thing for the industry – perhaps the “wake-up call” that is needed.
“Brands need positive emotional connections with their consumers and emotions mean money, so they can’t afford, in monetary terms, to upset people with bad advertising,” Elms said.
“Brands with more affinity are stronger and more meaningfully different and this leads to better sales.”
Sue Todd, chief executive of Magnetic, said that receptivity remains marketing’s “biggest challenge”, and that the onus is on the entire industry to tackle the issue.
“We know that magazine media brands provide a very receptive environment to advertising, in addition to driving well-being for consumers,” Todd said.
“Receptivity is marketing’s biggest challenge and as it becomes harder to find in a more and more cluttered media world, magazine media brands continue to engage consumers at a deep level, meeting our need for both pleasure and purpose.
“We hope that the debates heard at Spark will continue to run, as we all work together to tackle advertising’s climate change issue.”
