Ipsos MediaCT: The social media advertising conundrum

In the latest of our Research Focus reports, Ipsos MediaCT examines the challenges around advertising on social media…

Consumers like to think that they hate advertising. Over the last 50 years they have witnessed one social pleasure after another selling itself out to the lure of the advertising buck. Their television, their radio, their cinema, their outdoor space, their sports, their music events, their cultural events, their mobile phones, their computers – all hijacked by the advertising men to form the marketing cudgel with which they get battered on a daily basis.

Ask consumers for adjectives to describe advertising and the most common responses would be ‘annoying’, ‘intrusive’, ‘repetitive’ and ‘irritating’. Most would describe it as a blight on their daily lives, would be happy for it to disappear altogether and would choose to avoid it where possible. That is why for many people the Sky+ handset represents one of the greatest leaps forward in technology in recent years. The blissful feeling of reducing a 3 minute ad break to 10 seconds was a hugely compelling consumer proposition.

You might think that alluring offers such as unlimited access to the latest music, movies and games might be sufficient to help an ad abhorring nation overcome its prejudices, but recent Ipsos research has shown this not to be the case. Offered free access to full length streaming movies over the internet with 2-3 minutes of advertising inserted every 20 minutes, only 11% of consumers would be very interested. This offer was a little more appealing than free access to music with similar 2-3 minute ad breaks, which was found to be very interesting by 9% of consumers, whilst free access to music via a mobile phone network was only interesting to 5% of consumers.

All of the above presents something of a headache for the owners of cherished social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook. These sites built their popularity upon platforms that were largely advertising free. Here were new social pleasures that could be enjoyed without having to endure the constant shout of brand messages. But with Google facing a $400m loss on its YouTube investment this year and Facebook struggling to contain the costs of expanding its service around the world, advertising revenue appears to offer the only way out. The punters are not going to like it.

At least they won’t like it if it means the transformation of their sites into a Piccadilly Circus of flashing banners and skyscrapers. But deep down consumers are not as anti-advertising as they would have you believe, it is just that the constant exposure wears them down sometimes. Most people will happily engage in a conversation about advertising in the media – the ads they love, the ads they hate, the ads they remember from their youth. Sitting on the sofa we share our views on those ads we see. We express admiration for their inventiveness, we scoff at their silliness or we fume at their outrageousness. Whatever it might be, the most effective advertising brings out some kind of engaged response in us.

The social media sites face a real battle in the pursuit of profitability, and although advertising is the obvious answer, it is far from obvious how it can be applied in a way that will generate an engaged response from consumers rather than a direct dismissal (and a reluctance to go on using the new ad-infested site). Unlike the social pleasures of the past, new social media sites might spring up at any time from any corner of the globe and consumer loyalties transferred. For the YouTubes and Facebooks of the cyber world to survive we may have to witness a more rapid evolution of the advertising idea across new media platforms, than at any point in its history so far.