Posts Tagged ‘Internet’
What if the Consumer Hates Your Product?
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.
[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….
