Ad Receptivity: An Inconvenient Truth
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Advertising plays a vital role in building brands. But even the best advertising, for a well-loved brand, perfectly deployed through media, needs a receptive audience. Consumer receptivity to advertising is our industries most precious asset – it is our oxygen. Today I want to convince everyone here that advertising receptivity is at genuine risk and we must, together, take better care of it. Our behaviours as an advertising industry have been more bad than good and this is turning people off. We are belching out our own version of CO2 and ruining the environment for communications effectiveness. People are becoming less receptive to advertising and it is our own fault – that’s the inconvenient truth.
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Ad Receptivity: An Inconvenient Truth
- 1. 1 Ad Receptivity: An Inconvenient Truth Sue.elms@millwardbrown.com @SueatMB https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/sue-elms
- 4. Q: Describe when you last remember realizing a video ad had been targeted at you. Where did it happen and how did it make you feel? Q: Advertisers can target the video ads you see in many different ways. How do you feel about video ad targeting based on…?
- 5. Q: How would you characterize your attitude towards the following formats of video advertising? Q: How much control do you feel you have over whether you do or don't watch the following formats of video advertising?
- 9. Source: BrandZ 2014 UK
Editor's Notes
- Slide 1 - People are less receptive to advertising and it is our fault Advertising plays a vital role in building brands. But even the best advertising, for a well-loved brand, perfectly deployed through media, needs a receptive audience. Consumer receptivity to advertising is our industries most precious asset – it is our oxygen. Today I want to convince everyone here that advertising receptivity is at genuine risk and we must, together, take better care of it. Our behaviours as an advertising industry have been more bad than good and this is turning people off. We are belching out our own version of CO2 and ruining the environment for communications effectiveness. People are becoming less receptive to advertising and it is our own fault – that’s the inconvenient truth.
- Slide 2 – Vicious circles There are two vicious circles that I see going on…. First is the “being heard” or share of voice arms race: Clients have been seeing declining ad awareness over time – not just for TV but also online – and they worry because it used to be very responsive and it’s a key sales indicator We know that declining ad awareness response correlates with increasing advertising clutter and clutter has been increasing hugely with digital channels providing so much more inventory. We also see that too much frequency in too short a time frame can have negative effects on a brand. It’s getting harder to be heard for sure – but the reaction to that should not be to shout louder or more often! Second is the circle of tenacious targeting torment! Online response rates are declining – UK Jan-Jun CTR 0.07 was half that of 2012 The natural reaction when someone isn’t responding is to try again, and again, with more persuasive messaging, in more places where we can be “relevant” until we’ve got them trapped and are literally forcing them to listen. Surely it doesn’t have to be this way!
- Slide 3 – targeting can be ugly but can be good This data comes from MB’s latest AdReaction Survey – just published. This is a 42 country study, interviewing 13,500 multiscreen about their receptivity to video advertising. I think it tells a general story however that applies to any media. What it shows us is that the negative reaction to certain forms of targeting is profound. The bad stuff is targeting based on search history, social media profile and web browsing history. But there are some welcome targeting practices – really welcome – which is heartening. The good stuff is targeting on personal interests, brand interest and relevant editorial content. We just need to back off the bad stuff and use the good stuff.
- Slide 4 – control is the main driver of receptivity This slide is from the same study and shows the correlation between the feeling of having greater control over ad exposure and higher advertising receptivity. Considering we have 42 countries here I think we may have a fundamental human truth on our hands!
- Slide 5 – but abuse that consumer control at your risk When you abuse that control the negative effect is huge. Just look at how people react to ads they don’t have control over. 60% have a negative reaction, far outweighing any positive reaction. Again we have hope. Overall when people have control, the positives and negatives balance out to a neutral position. Which is ok really since all advertising is actually interruption. Here we also see that providing some sort of reward is positive. Some sort of value exchange is important to consider then. People are making it pretty clear to us what they don’t like and we have some clues to good practice already. Are we going to listen to them? Are we going to act quickly enough to redress the situation?
- Slide 7 – we don’t have long! TGI data shows more people becoming closed to advertising in the UK over time. 33% of adults in 2014 said they found advertising a waste of their time and that was up by 2.9 million people – or 20% - from 2013 Even a cautious extrapolation of the UK trends would suggest that in about three years half the UK will be mentally closed to advertising And we have the rise of ad blockers – the so called coming AdBlockalypse . My question is how far this will go in the UK before we act? Will the UK – currently with 10% of people ad-blocking go the way France – currently on their way to 30%? If so, we will find that in three years at least a third of people in the UK are also physically closed – at least online.
- Slide 8 – brands cannot afford to ignore the warnings I hope I have convinced you that ad receptivity is at genuine risk. Now I want to show why brand managers need to engage. Brands need to build positive emotional connections with consumers. Emotions mean money. They simply cannot afford to upset people with bad advertising, brutally deployed.
- Slide 9 – brands with more affinity are stronger and more meaningfully different and this leads to better sales These visuals are drawn from a special analysis of UK BrandZ data covering 327 brands. BrandZ has been going ten years and over that time MB have spoken to 3 million people about more than 100,000 brands around the world. We combine this data with financial data to compile a number of annual brand rankings and we interrogate this data base alongside other data sources to understand what makes brand tick – what makes them grow. Both groups of brands split across the left and right visuals are successful. They all have stronger salience than their category average and all have higher short term sales potential as indicated by their power scores in the circles in the middle. They have been split on the basis of their emotional engagement with their consumers. The ones on the right have higher affinity levels than the ones on the left. What I am trying to show here is that the higher affinity brands are stronger. Comparing the left visual to the right visual we can see that brands with stronger affinity are 21% more Meaningful and 28% more Different. They also have 22% more Power which – since it is validated to short term sales growth - is a very desirable outcome!
- Slide 10 – a strong emotional connection adds value to the brand Working on building strong emotional connection with their consumers increases the sales success of brands. In fact a stronger meaningful difference supercharges any growth in salience. A validation we conducted on brands that increased their salience over time showed that brands with strong meaningful difference grew three times more than those with weak meaningful difference over a five year period. The most exciting thing is that higher affinity brands can also command a price premium. Their perceived price is 18% higher than lower affinity brands yet 71% of people see them as “worth what they cost” – versus 56% for lower affinity brands – a 27% advantage. Millward Brown uses these two elements to develop its Brand Premium score and this is validated against actual behavior. So a strong emotional connection adds real value to the brand - the value is stronger market share growth in the short and long term, and a higher price premium. The final wonderful thing is that it also makes advertising easier! If someone likes the brand, they don’t mind its advertising, it is a bit more relevant and it is a bit more welcome. Brand’s do matter and this pre-disposition / emotional connection helps you get past the block and sell with less need to shout and stalk. The best way to have strong receptivity is to have a strong brand in the first place.
- Slide 11 – Too much of X, not enough of Y, and it really matters In our increasingly connected world, advertising and other brand content will be always on and targeted more and more tightly to context and situations and people’s behaviours. But the consumer may not always be willing to receive that message. If we continue to boost the volume and intrusiveness of advertising then we risk turning off this precious resource. It is time to stop and think, ensure we adapt to this new reality, put receptivity centre stage and improve our practices as an industry.
- So where do we start? Here are my starters for our discussion session: Change our language to one of respect and relationships – stop military analogies like campaigns, objectives, targets, hits Stop using share of voice, noise and frequency as a substitute for thought and effort to out-engage the competition. Use the media mix to increase your likelihood of finding a more receptive consumer and get the most from every moment to talk Deliver remarkable ideas and advertising experiences – good creative delivers higher short term ROI and lasts longer than you think, remarkable advertising experiences get talked about with the brand name firmly attached Responsibly use native before it also gets a bad name; tap the amazing skills of the media owners own editors Make targeting engaging rather than threatening, make programmatic part of the solution, and reap the rewards Develop a more balanced scorecard and measurement of success, transactional mixed with emotional, embrace what neuro tell us about how we are genuinely connecting
- Slide 13 – think share of heart and plant more trees The rise of ad blocking could come to be seen as a good thing, an early sign for us to react to. We are belching out greenhouse gases and dangerously close to destroying our oxygen We need to stop now think share of heart and plant more trees