I Hate You: A Tale About Advertising

What do you do if nearly every consumer hates nearly every product you produce?

This is exactly what has happened with advertising today.

Think about the lengths people go to to avoid watching ads on TV.  As soon as they come on, we lunge for the remote to change the channel.  We buy expensive DVRs that advertise the ability to skip ads AS A BENEFIT. And we willingly pay a premium for some websites or iPhone apps for which the only additional value is that the paid version is free of advertising.  How embarrassing is that? That people are paying NOT to consume your product.

The irony is, the advertising industry knows everyone hates what they produce. This is why they keep looking for new ways to force people to stay tuned. There are now ads at the beginning of online news clips or other online video content that are impossible to skip. It's infuriating.  There are ads on BlueRay DVDs now that we can't fast-forward or skip to the main menu until we've endured the pitch.

But here's a more interesting question - how did it come to pass that modern day advertising is so painful?

The reason is simple, and it has nothing to do with the rise of the internet and other technologies. The reason we hate advertising is because the ad industry has no idea who its customer is; it is we - the general public who are the final consumer of their product.  Ironic that an industry devoted to telling others who to focus on doesn't know who to focus on. Probably not so ironically, it's the same issue that stymies the music industry, the publishing industry and every other industry that seems to be struggling "to define itself" in this internet generation. They are all looking for an internet strategy when its their customer they are ignoring.

Steve Jobs recently shared his thoughts about how the entire music industry failed to innovate something like iTunes. His answer was as profound as it was simple (fancy that). The music industry, he expounds, thought their customer was Tower Records or Virgin MegaStore...but it never was.  Those were their distribution channels. The actual customer is the person who consumes the music. And it is the end user, not the intermediaries, whom Apple focuses on in all they do.

The ad industry thinks their clients are their customers. They think the companies who pay for the production are the ones they are supposed to serve.  So the ads they produce make their clients happy...but infuriate the rest of us.  So much so, that the only innovations in the industry are the new ways they find to force us to watch what we are actively trying to avoid watching. Like the music industry, the corporate marketers are the distribution channel. They pay for the production and the media to distribute the creative product. But it is the buying customer who consumes the media.

Like any other industry on the planet that has a problem with selling their product (and in the case of advertising, selling doesn't mean pay for - it means pay attention to), the first thing they do is improve the quality of their product.  In this case, that means making something people like, something people will watch without being forced.

Leave America and you'll find that the consumers in many other countries enjoy watching advertising. Not because the products are better, but because the ads are produced to be entertaining.  Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they are dramatic.  Sometimes they are just beautiful.  But they are, on balance, produced to be more appealing for the people watching them.

Here's what I propose: the ad industry should work to improve the quality of their product to a point where people want to watch it. American companies do this once a year on the Super Bowl - the only time of the year Americans enjoy watching advertising. Why is that quality of entertainment not being produced the other 364 days? Simple - because what gets measured gets done. And the Super Bowl is the only day of the year that the quality of ads is measured based on its entertainment value.

The quality of advertising should always be measured based on how entertaining or engaging it is. They should stop measuring how many people are forced to watch (reach and frequency) and start measuring how many people choose to watch. Count how many people skip an ad versus how many opt to keep watching it. The more people that watch means you have produced better, more compelling advertising.

Producing a product for the consumers who are the ones actually consuming the product makes more business sense, too.  Clients would be able to spend less on media because the work would be more memorable.  Plus, if people CHOOSE to watch the ads, they are more likely to like the brands, products and companies featured in those ads.  In other words, if advertising was made for consumers and not clients the ultimate benefactor would actually be the client...and isn't that supposed to be the job of good advertising?

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Comments

[Internet Marketing Agency]

Another great article, Mate!

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You are too great a writer man. I am in love with all your articles and wait for them to appear. But, this article of all that you have written until now is my personal favorite. I shall surely have the same article forwarded ahead and spread the information to one and all.

[rahul]

interesting artical to read,going good,

[T warr]

I think the reason people hate ads is because there are just too many of them. Every where we go, everything we do is bombarded with ads for services and goods we don't need, don't want and probably can't afford.

[Buy Online Rx]

Continue by helping your child come up with untraditional ways to make music like flipping pages in a book, shaking a bean in a can, or zipping a zipper. These are ways for your child to create music without any training and to start them on the road to becoming little twenty-first century composers.

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Some of the photographs are great, but I was hoping this project would raise some interesting questions, such as what flags mean to people, whether they still have a role today, and so on. Instead we get some oh-so-witty photos of the flag as wee or draped over the designer's dog. Maybe I'm just surprised no-one set the flag on fire and took a photograph of the remains.

[Paul Cunningham]

At uni years ago we were shown that there are really only three categories of advertising - sex; class; and the brotherhood of man. I'm no expert and maybe there's others but I think this remains largely true. Apple uses the brother hood of man to sell its stuff (father/daughter) in the example above. Why is this so amazing to everybody?

[Tljones21]

Wow, Simon this was a great blog post! You know a funny thing happened right as I was finishing up reading this note. I looked up and an Apple commercial came on. Its a new commercial, one depicting the new iPhone 4 and Facetime, it video chat program. In the commercial a dad is trying to get his daughter to smile and she keeps refusing. Then the dad proceeds to sing to her until she finally smiles and he gets to see here new braces. He says he likes them and she says, "really?" and he says something to the effect of, "yes, you look beautiful," and she smiles and says thank you in an reassured way. Its crazy, but within the 15 seconds that that commercial was on, I almost teared up. I actually really connected with the commercial and it connected with my desire to one day be a great dad. I connected to the Apple brand. It was awesome to read and learn from your viewpoints and then to very quickly afterwards have the concepts reaffirmed! A+ Simon for a great blog post! A+ Apple for actually creating a connection between me and your brand!!!

Check the video out at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niOCmIuts90

[Joel]

I'm appalled and astonished at the number of people who start talking to me about a TV or radio ad, assuming I've seen or heard it. Apparently, far too many people are still watching or listening.

I have a little twitch in one finger from killing commercials with my remote, but somehow, other people are still complaining about the terrible commercials they've seen. Find something to do in the kitchen for 90 seconds.

I do :)

[Jerry Kennedy]

Once again, great post Simon! Your thoughts and ideas have been changing my life/business/writing...everything. Looking forward to more great insights.

Thanks for sharing!

Jerry Kennedy
Inside Out Business Solutions

[Sjoerd]

Very odd to see that advertising is similar to a television commercial in this article. As long as you make your commercial more entertaining it will have the desired effect. How shortsighted. Also in other countries (where I am from) advertising, even when it is entertaining, keeps declining. Why? Because it is interrupting. Let's start by realizing people do not want to be interrupted. And if you still want to interrupt, I agree... do so by making it entertaining and personally relevant.

[Dream Warrior Jenni P]

What many big companies have missed completely is that 'Supply the demand' is so much more sexy than 'Buy my stuff'. If all products and services were tailored to society's shifting needs and whims, instead of representing an indulgent pressure hose, we would probably sit down and watch the adverts in place of the telly. This from someone who no longer watches it!:)

[Mikprice]

Simone... they've been doing un-forwardable ads on DVD's for years. (Even before Blu-Ray

[Ron dimon]

Or this: http://gapingvoid.com/2010/07/16/supergenius-conference-in-nyny-next-week/
"advertising is the cost of being boring"

[Ted Kusio]

Imagine how more powerful an ad is when it's sought out by a consumer and then shared with others. "Hey, did you see that cool Old Spice commercial?" I bet you'll never hear anyone say "Hey, did you see that new (insert laundry detergent brand here) commercial?"

Meanwhile, forcing consumers to watch ads on DVDs actually leads programers to create new technology that will people skip ads, and, hey, why not, also make the disks copyable. So in a way, the industry is pre-shooting itself in the foot, again.

Ah, the good old days of VHS...