I genuinely feel that non-interruptive marketing is going to be the major component of any marketing strategy & is potentially the future of marketing. Yes, I said it! And some evidence is in order here.
Well, ask yourself if you like advertisements? I’m referring to those interruptions between your youtube videos, or when you’re listening to music on Spotify. I mean these guys literally interrupt you with an ad that says “hate interruptions, go buy Spotify premium” 😂.
Look, there are two sides to this situation here: consumer side and business side.
As consumers, we clearly despise advertisements. We’re buying premiums to avoid ads. We’re blocking cookies in our browsers and switching to browsers that don’t collect the information needed to display ads.
A while back in the cable TV era, people started skipping TV ads by recording their favourite shows & fast forwarding the commercials while playback.
Today almost everyone has ad blocker installed on their browser to block the ads, even if the ones that aren’t blocked have very low visibility due to a phenomenon called banner blindness, in which we’re so used to seeing ads that we subconsciously ignore them.
Image legends:
Red: areas where visitors looked at the most
Yellow: areas with fewer views
Blue: even fewer
Gray: no views at all
Coming on to the business side, well, the whole new business models are here now.
The internet era started with google and its agenda of providing free information. It indirectly earned from the users via advertisers on their platform, same goes for YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and any other free service providers.
This apparently led to the exponential growth of these firms. And it’s now leading to the downfall of such revenue models.
Ads are dirt cheap on some of these platforms. I’ve seen Youtube charge as low as INR 0.1 per view. This obviously varies depending on keywords, industry, etc.
But the point here is that they are cheap. Moreover, for those who don’t know, there’s an ad type called skippable ad, this is the one where we see the option of skipping the ad after 5 seconds.
Now check this out – a view is counted only when a user watches the ad for more than 15 seconds, if the user skips the ad before that then it isn’t counted as a view and hence not charged. Now isn’t this a lucrative option for advertisers.
There’s no surprise why there’s such an abundance of these ads and why youtube started showing 2 ads before a video now. And now, almost every video has two 15 to 20 second ads. Youtube even tried launching a 30 second non-skippable ad but scrapped it later.
Anyway, I’m not complaining as there’s always an option of buying the premium version of these apps, which now brings us to the new business/revenue model.
The new business model is here now which directly earns from users via subscription fee to get that ad & frustration free experience. It’s usually called a premium like youtube premium, Spotify premium, etc. And as previously discussed, people are willing to pay that price.
There are new search engines such as Neeva that offer a private ad free experience for a monthly subscription. This search engine was co-founded by Mr. Sridhar Ramaswamy who ironically led Google’s advertising division. Well, doesn’t that speak for itself?
Then there’s Netflix which solved the frustration of TV ads, Spotify premium solved radio ads’ frustration, you get the point.
As a result, both consumers and businesses are turning away from advertisements. Traditional advertising channels are simply not performing as well as they once did.
I understood this sentiment a while back and hence focused my career away from interruptive style of marketing & towards value driven marketing.
Anyway, the good thing about marketing is that you don’t have to love one & hate another style of it. At the end of the day the job of any form of marketing is to bring in more business.
So, choose the best tactics/methods/forms of marketing according to your product, customer, industry, competition, etc.
For the record, I’m not against ads, I’m against irrelevant ads. There are ads that don’t feel interruptions. And this only happens when you properly define & target your audience.
For instance, you could run an ad to give your target audience a valuable lead magnet. This creates a win-win situation. A marketer gets a valid lead and your audience gets the required information/value.
Things go messy when we don’t properly target the right audience and go berserk by trying to show ads to the whole universe.
Any ad must be relevant to not only the right audience, but also to the stage of the buyer journey they are in!
DISCLAIMER: As the term “blog” suggests, – this is my point of view alone. Don’t take this to your heart without due diligence & research. Cheers!