ManSavesDog

For nearly a decade now I’ve been hearing, “This is the year for mobile advertising.” However, based on recent polling research I suspect the mobile industry has a bigger, underlying problem that that will greatly slow its adoption: Even advertisers hate the idea of ads on their phones.

In polls conducted with more than 2,000 visitors to Adweek.com, developed in conjunction with research provider Vizu, research showed that 76 percent of advertising types said, “Over my dead body” would they be willing to receive advertising on their cell phones. Only 15 percent said “Yes,” but it was a qualified “yes,” requiring permission. And these were ad people being surveyed, not general consumers.

As former CEO of the IAB, I believe I learned a thing or two about what it takes to create a new medium and garner advertising industry support.

First, know that I believe in the vitality of mobile advertising because I think it has a compelling, unique selling proposition and the power of locality — a new way for advertisers to target and bring relevance to their advertising messages. Mobile has many other strengths, including: interactivity; the fact that it’s personal (and will hopefully be personalized); its omnipresence (which, while unique, could also be accomplished with media mix); and its ability to do sight, sound and motion, with which marketers tend to be enamored.

As a marketer, I’d really want to be looking at those elements, in particular the USP, to figure out how they can be leveraged to get a competitive advantage for my brand. And it’s best to do that now, before my competition figures it out.

Today, cell phones and other devices already have a major audience. In the same research, we found that 77 percent of Adweek.com’s readers have a cell phone, 63 percent have a Blackberry or BB-like device and 72 percent have an iPod or similar device. It makes you wonder if the ubiquity and familiarity of mobile might be working against itself.

Plus, it’s not like advertisers don’t use the standard “medium” feature of their phones. Fifty percent of Adweek.com’s readers said they access the Internet on their cell phone at least once a week and 35 percent of those said they do it every day.

Additionally, 49 percent take business calls “anytime” and another 14 percent said they take calls from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thirty-one percent said they check their Blackberries until 11 p.m. and 22 percent said they check them all night. Finally, 63 percent said they text every day.

The data surely suggest this is not a medium that’s going to die from lack of reach, low usage or not having a USP. No, this is a medium that the most important consumers in the world, the advertisers, prefer not to be tainted with ads.

In my last Adweek.com piece I highlighted that the rate of ad blocking on the Internet is out of control and DVRs in TV land are demonstrating that consumers are fed up with advertising’s practices. Mobile is apparently suffering from contempt (as a medium) prior to execution.

I suspect that marketers, at some level, are afraid their own typical spray & pray approach used in other media might be applied to this much more personal medium.

I often get asked to speak on how we can avoid making the same mistakes the Internet made, to which I answer the following.

First, a new medium needs to prove not just its advertising effectiveness, but its cost effectiveness versus other options. Mobile hasn’t done this in the way that it needs to yet, and it needs to look beyond the value of a click, which the Internet was way too slow to address.

Second, as the new kid on the block, mobile needs to make sure an agency makes a profit in working within the medium, which requires there to be good operational processes, integrated technology to their other systems, common measurement, consistent nomenclature and, most importantly, standards across the board. Mobile appears to have just gotten started in these areas.

Third, mobile needs to figure out ubiquitous and compelling ad units that invite creative exploration. In 2003, the IAB announced the death of the 468 x 60 banner not because the banner didn’t work, but because creatives didn’t like it.

Fourth and most challenging is it needs to figure out how to minimize the inherent challenge of fragmentation at various levels including different carrier systems, different handsets, different software,  If TV acted like mobile and every cable network (or cable system) and every TV set was different, then clearly TV advertising spending would not be over $50 billion today. Mobile must deal with the fragmentation of its medium and complexity at every level. These are not small issues.

But in the end, I think the most important lesson learned is not to let your medium get to the place, like Internet advertising did, where anyone thinks pop ups and other consumer-offensive activity are OK. Resist ads like punch the monkey or flashing screens so irritating that some in the U.K. believed the medium could trigger epileptic fits. Don’t let the phrase, “But it’s effective,” be a defense for irritating the consumer.

So my big lesson learned for Mobile?

Fight to the death those who want to use/abuse the medium for short-term gain but long-term loss, even if a marketer. Attack any entity trying to participate in mobile who disrespects the consumer or outright annoys them.  Aggressively protect consumer trust, whether it be around issues of privacy or other issues of transparency to consumer.

Here’s a twist on the famous David Ogilvy quote that the customer is your wife: For new media like mobile, the customer is your advertiser. Act accordingly.

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Reprinted from Adweek Magazine

In a twist on John Wanamaker’s famous quote, research suggests that more than 50 percent of consumers hate what advertisers do for a living. In an online survey conducted by Vizu Answers against a broad sample of over 2,000 Internet users, 56 percent of respondents said that they want to eliminate all advertising, while only 44 percent accept advertising as it is. Even more bleakly, 72 percent said they find advertising “annoying” or “extremely annoying.”

While consumer dislike of advertising may not be new or even surprising, the degree to which consumers hate ads and the action they can and do take to avoid ads today is worrying for the entire industry.

When asked what medium’s ads do you “go to the most effort to avoid,” Internet outpaces all media with 36 percent of respondents answering affirmatively, while 28 percent of the respondents pointed to TV.

When asked “What media has the most invasive and irritating advertisements?” the Internet again gets top billing, with nearly 48 percent choosing it. TV is no slouch in this category either, which at 27 percent rates as the number two most-intrusive and irritating medium.

Consumers’ displeasure with TV ads led to 42 percent noting they’d “pay an extra $20 per month to avoid ads.” (That’s in addition to what they pay for cable.)

The marketplace confirms the distaste for ads with one in five households owning a DVR—a device used to avoid ads as much as to time shift media consumption.

I was at first heartened to see that only 10 percent of responding consumers were willing to pay $20 per month to avoid ads on the Internet. Upon further consideration, however, it seemed obvious that consumers would be reluctant to pay for something they now get for free! Some 79 percent of survey respondents said they already had a pop-up blocker of some sort and 43 percent said they already had ad blocking software.

Blocking ads on the Internet is so easy that even Norton’s Internet Security software had ad blocking built in the first versions because, as their product people told me directly, “our customers wanted it,” And the increasingly popular Firefox browser has a simple, free and downloadable add-on that strips out display advertising on Web pages.

To be clear, while these ad-blocking efforts automatically strip out display advertising, the online advertising business model is not negatively affected because industry counting methodologies do not count blocked ads as impressions.

[GS1] Ad-blocking data I saw in 2005 as CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau indicated that 7 percent to 8 percent of all in-page ads were being blocked (this didn’t include pop-up ads, just the graphical ads inserted into the web page). Lest we think Google and search ads are exempt, 5 percent to 6 percent of those ads were estimated to be blocked as well. And these numbers were trending up at the time. A further view of where ad blocking may be going is that increasingly-used Firefox browser users were four times more likely to block ads than users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

Here’s a good question for marketers: What is the future of a business where the consumer hates your product, which in our case is the Advertisements? Or where the manufacturer of that product is unresponsive to the viewpoints of the consumer? And where apparently the provider of that product has no respect for the consumer’s time nor makes any major effort to make its products relevant, let alone liked?

My hope is that this research, which should of course be validated by additional studies, causes the advertising industry to evolve its practices. Evolution could include reducing the amount of commercial clutter in TV, or further decreasing the Internet’s use of irriatating and annoying online ads. As ever, the need persists to address the irrelevance and poor targeting of ads in all media.

Additionally, as came out from the research for my book, What Sticks, 47 percent of ad campaigns analyzed did not hit a consumer motivation that mattered or deliver an ad message the consumer understood. By any measure, that’s abysmal. Even worse when you consider that the 30 campaigns analyzed were developed by major agencies for blue chip advertisers such as Procter &Gamble, Kraft, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s and others.

As is increasingly apparent to everyone—and as this new research confirms—as all media become digital, the consumer is more in control than ever, and tools for ad avoidance are free and require little to no consumer effort. As a result the advertising industry can afford less than ever to be unresponsive to consumers’ views and preferences. To be insensitive to them will be painful, costly and potentially devastating. Just ask someone in the music industry the power of consumer control in the digital world.

By Greg Stuart

Greg Stuart is an advisor to numerous digital media and marketing businesses. He is also the former CEO of the IAB and co-author of What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails….