How Advertising Will Survive and Thrive in the Era of Relentlessly Increasing Customer Expectations
Almost no one wants to see our stuff. And so our little world of advertising is changing — fast.
Advertisers, platforms, and publishers — whose lifeblood is the attraction and conversion of attention — have been forced to rapidly adapt to a new environment. An environment in which control rests squarely in the hands of people, not the institutions who built their fortresses around centralized, controlled access. Those who choose to fight the paradigm shift are scripting their tragic place in a modern-day case study on economic Darwinism.
First, a spot of perspective: if we’re honest with ourselves, outside the narrow confines of our edit bays and conference rooms, most of the time most people will do whatever they can to avoid the things we pour our collective hearts into. The generalized tolerance for advertising as a means to get what we really want (our guilty pleasure TV show, our daughter’s favorite YouTuber’s latest upload, the scathing new op-ed on a national paper’s site) is diminishing, entirely independently of “ad quality,” however that is defined.
Rather than delude ourselves into thinking this is exclusively a matter of storytelling quality, narrative structure, ad placement, or data layering and fight the progress as reductive and self-defeating, we must acknowledge and embrace these new conditions. We must leverage them to our benefit, not resign ourselves to being handcuffed or stifled by them.
Call it a threat to creativity, to storytelling principles, to our industry’s integrity. Call it whatever you want, but no lusting desire to return to “the things that made advertising great in the first place” is powerful enough to stop the relentless tide of changing customer expectations and behaviors.
Many things in our business have stayed the same. As Bob Hoffman reminded us, the first principle of advertising is to attract someone’s attention. This remains as true now as it ever has.
Though while our most elemental directive is unchanged, the dynamics that allow us to live up to that first principle have changed. Understanding just how profoundly these new conditions change our mandate in this epoch of advertising demands exceptional nuance, a willingness to accept change, to call bullshit, to take calculated risks.
A brief departure from the confines of adland offers tremendous insight into the source of these new dynamics.
In many of the most omni-present and foundational aspects of our lives — what we eat and how we get our food, how we get to work or to dinner with friends, how we entertain ourselves and our families, how we get things done around the house — we have more control, more access, and fewer barriers to our desired outcome or state than at any point in history.
Endless ink has been spilled on the ways the titanic forces of Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Apple, and their ilk have made it their unrelenting mission to narrow the gap between what we want and how we get it. They endeavor to overdeliver on every aspect of the customer experience.
In this mindset of “customer obsession,” things like hardware, software, fulfilment, supply chain optimization, customer service, personalization, and speed are not cost centers to be managed down to the lowest acceptable levels. Obsession with the customer is the means of survival.
Unprecedented choice begets unprecedented competition. With more alternatives and new upstarts vying to own the customer relationship, this customer obsession doesn’t treat the relationship like a commodity. It treats it as something to be nurtured, rewarded, improved, and built upon.
These giants are setting, surpassing, and resetting the expectations people have of them almost daily.
While the benefits of this approach are increasingly concentrating gains and returns around these select few giants, the effects of this phenomenon they have unleashed are immeasurably profound and wide-reaching.
As Jeff Bezos so poignantly articulated in his 2018 annual letter to Amazon shareholders, which assessed the “divinely discontent” customer, “today’s ‘wow’ becomes tomorrow’s ‘ordinary.’”
People’s expectations go up and to the right, in perpetuity, with no ceiling. For the smart marketer, this is a good thing.
In the context of Bezos’ annual letter, Stratechery founder Ben Thompson characterized this phenomenon through the lens of relentlessly improving user experience as a potent antidote to disruption.
Most critically, at the same time these expectations are being elevated in some of the most frequent and important places in our daily lives, they increasingly do not remain isolated in the minds of the customer to those siloed places. This, again, is a good thing.
These new expectations that began as a wow become the ordinary, and we expect every company we interact with to meet, then exceed, these expectations. For example:
We project the new expectation of fast, free, no-hassle shipping that Amazon set onto every online merchant.
We project the new expectation of Apple’s stellar in-store experience onto our car dealerships.
And, finally returning from our journey beyond and back to world of advertising, we project the new expectation of entirely frictionless and ad-free (read: barrier-free) viewing experiences of HBO, Netflix, and Prime Video onto every environment in which we discover and enjoy content.
This is where modern customer expectations and our most common means of advertising have begun to clash.
When our ad interrupts the video we were in the middle of watching in our social feed, or we’re forced to watch a full :30 unskippable commercial before watching a brief clip our friend sent us, it feels like a burden. An obstruction. It takes control away at a time and in a place where we’re now increasingly growing accustomed to having it. It’s a tax levied on our attention.
We’re used to being able to scroll by anything we don’t want to see. We’re used to instant, on-demand, get-me-the-thing-I-asked-for-now.
Skippable ad formats are one of the current battle strategies we’re employing in the war for attention. The customer gets what they want — probably free of charge (one of the critically important means of value brought forth by the ad-supported internet) — and we advertisers have the opportunity to quickly earn someone’s attention before they hit that looming “SKIP AD” button when the brief countdown completes.
The challenge is clear: we used to have more time and space to build narratives through linear story arcs because people didn’t have a choice to skip us. We now have that luxury less often, and in fewer places. This leads to a few questions:
· How do we live up to the first principle of advertising, to our audience’s attention, with such little time and so many other things vying for their attention at that moment?
· How do we get their attention while living up to the most important business imperative for advertising: to convert that attention into a feeling, an interest, a preference, an action that creates and realizes value for the advertiser?
· Doesn’t frontloading the logo, USP, or product exacerbate the issue, signaling to the savvy viewer that the ad they’re seeing is definitely an ad, and we don’t even give them a chance to fall in love with the story we’re trying to craft?
These are hard questions. The responses are hard, too.
Discussion and debate on how we address the challenges these changing conditions impose is a thrilling endeavor and should be welcomed with enthusiasm.
Tweaking digital pre-roll to skip to the end, vs. skipping after the first few seconds to combat the constraint of reworked story arcs? Let’s give it a shot.
Short-form side-by-sides during live programming to combat the impossibly quick audience attention diversion that occurs when the game’s transition-to-break sequence begins. I’m in.
Thoughtful, nuanced exploration of proposed solutions, adjustments, and tools — free from pride or tunnel vision — should be celebrated and embraced. Picked apart and pressure tested. This is how true value creation occurs.
This active, relentlessly curious dialogue of discovery is the critical first step. Rolling up our sleeves and doing something about it is how we will survive and thrive.
In our pursuit of “better,” we will fail along the way — many, many times. Sometimes we’ll over-apply “best practices” in pursuit of optimization, other times we’ll too brazenly reject them in pursuit of retaining storytelling integrity.
This is OK.
Sometimes these very same things will be the key that unlocks “better.” More people might have the opportunity to see our stuff. More people might be better enticed to fail to ignore or avoid our work. More people might have a chance to hear what we have to say. And maybe they’ll be better moved to feel, think, or act differently as a result.
As ever, our challenge and opportunity is rooted in people. When advertisers approach our duties with the same fervent customer obsession that the Amazons and Netflixes of the world do, we will stop making “ads” as we know them today. We stop making things that people have to tolerate or begrudgingly endure. Things that, as Tom Goodwin has so simply articulated, people “only occasionally fail to ignore.”
We might begin to tell stories the way people are most capable of acknowledging and receiving them. We might recognize that the existing formats, tools, placements, and techniques we’re used to employing sometimes don’t function in this new paradigm. We might uncover entirely new means of connecting with and creating value for our customers.
Customers evolve, conditions change, and so must we.
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[A condensed version of this piece originally appeared on MUSEbyClio.]
