Maybe people will finally “get it” that you don’t sell on social…and that digital is completely done! (as a place to push ads that is) ”Today’s consumers decide where, when, and how they want to engage with brands”. Duh!!
Yeah…I know…there are bound to be legions of moronic digibots who will continue to try and force feed us pablum on our phones, in our Facebook streams, on our YouTube videos and just about everywhere else in the digital universe. They have no conceptual understanding of the value of permission based marketing.
To them, if there’s a whitespace somewhere, it means there has to be an ad there. I have to admit, there was a time that I had that same affliction. I too tried to sell everything I could from every affiliate program known to man to every person who visited my sites. But then I woke up.
I realized that it took way more effort and money to try and get eyeballs on a page to click an ad, than it took to gain permission from people by entering into a relationship with them.
Word of mouth is today’s currency. This was underscored in a recent study performed by Forrester Research.
Clearly people don’t want ads in their social streams. But if that’s the case, why do so many brands and marketers insist on shoving shit down our throats when they know we don’t want it? Maybe because they don’t want to accept the data or perhaps they just don’t understand how to read the data. For instance…these “digital wizards” weighed in with an opinion on Twitter after reading an article on the Forrester study. They tweeted this to me last night:
I guess they either didn’t really read the information or simply chose to ignore it…or worse…couldn’t comprehend what they were reading. As the information shown below, which comes directly from the article, completely refutes their “wizardry”.
The report notes that traditional ‘one-way’ marketing techniques like banner ads are clearly ineffective in a landscape of “perpetually connected consumers”. Web users are tuning out this old school type of marketing or failing to notice it in the first place or forgetting they ever saw it — which may also partially explain why personal recommendations from people they know well are so much more trusted. With so many sources of information to filter, better the devil you know and all that.
“Brand-led advertising online and offline has lost its allure,” notes report author Tracy Stokes. ”Today’s consumers decide where, when, and how they want to engage with brands. With multiple interconnected devices at their fingertips at any one time, these perpetually connected consumers can opt in or out of content as they choose… Marketers face a higher bar to engage consumers, who have more media options than ever before.”
Maybe we’ve found the problem. Marketers clearly can’t comprehend what consumers are telling them. Or worse, they simply don’t care.
