Brands need to be brave and bin the rhetoric

An ad is more effective when brands put the user first, argues James Booth, CEO of Rockabox.

As time passes, online advertising technology becomes more complex. Take a look at the corresponding LUMAscape and it is clear there’s certainly no shortage of players, each hoping to demonstrate a tech advantage that will lift display ad-response performance from nearly nothing to nearly nothing plus a bit. It’s not easy – those sophisticated, intolerant end users don’t play ball very often.

And there’s one very good reason for this – end users don’t see online display ads. Or do they? Might it be the case that actually, they just ignore them? One thing’s for sure, they mostly don’t care; with mind-sets when surfing very much focused on choice and control, it’s going to take a pretty spectacular piece of creative to drag them away from their mission.

Pre-roll video comes at this problem in a different way; as more of a ‘forced view’ approach it can’t be ignored so easily unless a ‘skip’ function is available. Statistics on the percentage of YouTube pre-roll ads being skipped reveal much about how we, the end users, feel about intrusion; add to that pre- and re-targeting and we can become pretty sick of an advertiser’s persistence.

It slightly reminds me of Lottie my dog when she’s decided it’s time to play tug-of-war with the remnants of something she’s left just about intact enough for the task. She’ll follow me round the house, dropping it at my feet, to then stand back with an expectant ‘go on then’ expression on her face. Eventually she wins; fortunately for me the experience is generally a good one. I’d never be as tolerant with a brand.

In the old days, we addressed indifference with volume. Pop-ups and overlay formats were all about not being ignored. Many years ago, I was chatting to the marketing board of a major car manufacturer. After the session, one of them asked me to look at a research report that ran during a recent display campaign. The perplexing thing for these guys was why brand awareness had increased dramatically when propensity to buy had collapsed.

In this case, the problem was the intrusive questionnaire being launched while the display ad was still present; resentful users made their feelings clear via the panel. More recently, we’ve started coming at user engagement from a different angle, through native advertising. To many, this more recent approach is seen as duping the user; the bad press has started. Once again, we’re leaning towards tricks.

Here’s an idea: what about putting the end user first? Just a thought. I say this because, much like Lottie, the approach seems so one-sided. Despite all we’ve learned over the years of online advertising, many brands are still not courageous enough to park the rhetoric when it comes to display advertising.

It’s so often about pushing the user to notice the brand’s presence in the creative rather than the exchange being about what the user may value.

If Lottie brought me a glass of wine when I got home on a Friday evening, the tug-of-war might not last as long but I would certainly be impressed, and I suspect Lottie would be my new best friend on Fridays; not that she isn’t already of course.

Back in 2006 at the IAB Engage conference, a few of us were asked to comment on the impact social media might have on how brands talked to their target audiences, and how smart brands were going to need to ‘unthink’ some of their old approaches. I think we need to ask similar questions again.

Content marketing offers brands a wonderful canvas for engagement. Small-time clothing brand Wren stunned the world with its film First Kiss – close to 94 million YouTube views later and 14,000% uplift in sales (according to CNBC.com), shows how putting the user first and delivering something of relevance and value can shift advocacy considerably; now a widely accepted approach when thinking about content marketing.

However, how many brands would allow their branding not to appear within a display ad call-to-action unit? Clearly it’s not as simple as running an unbranded advert and for many direct response approaches, I suspect the brand element is necessary to make sense of the message.

But, for branding and brand-response campaigns, I believe we’re missing opportunities for engagement; not a duping type of approach but one where transparency and honesty sit at the core of the proposition.

In my previous life, I watched tens of thousands of rich media ads go live. Well, I saw very few in reality but a consistent pattern could be seen from the more successful campaigns, and without doubt, those that approached engagement from a standpoint of relevance worked the best. In particular, those where the branding wasn’t present resulted in many times the average score for effectiveness.

Creative agencies love a creative challenge; end users look for things of interest. Let’s allow our creative agencies a bit more headroom for branding campaigns where display is an element.

Much as the vloggers will be largely forgiven for working with brands if they’re open and honest about it, so will end users not hold it against a brand for bringing them something of value and if that value proposition is central to the communication, the display creative may well get noticed.