No More Bad Ads

When I was growing up, I thought of an ad as what happened during my Saturday morning cartoons: A commercial break with two or three minutes of 30 second ads for a bunch of different cereals. Those advertisements were a disruption from the regularly scheduled programming — the cartoon that I was watching — and I would have to sit through the pain to get back to the content. 

All forms of content, from TV to the radio to websites, run ads. And those ads historically have been a disruption. Especially if you aren’t subscribing to the service or accessing an article behind a paywall, ads are how the content provider makes money. They take advantage of the fact that your eyeballs are on the content, and they slide in a sales opportunity for a business who wants to take advantage of the fact that you are watching. It’s because of all of this that I believe the best kind of ads are closer to content than they are to disruption. They create a seamless experience for the consumer. Often, they are more instantly memorable thain their traditional counterparts. 

While a brand might have trouble discerning what is an effective ad, which pushes the conversation forward or leaves the consumer with something to consider, and what is junk, the audience always knows. And convincing your audience to like your ad is key to converting them to purchase your product, and to keep them coming back to you as a brand they trust.

The History of Branded Content

The concept of content marketing is over 100 years old, and it’s rooted in brands creating helpful content that actually resonates with consumers. And brands that really live their truth and then talk about it are the brands that will succeed.

If you live in a city with a food scene, you have probably heard of the Michelin guide, which is a list of all the best restaurants in all the major cities around the world. If a restaurant gets one or more Michelin stars, it's a big accomplishment for the chef and it brings a lot of business to the restaurant. It was published by the Michelin tire company in the early 1900s when cars were first becoming ubiquitous. At the time people weren't leaving Paris — they didn't trust their cars nor the infrastructure. God forbid you pop a tire or something, and you're 20 kilometers outside of the city. What do you do? 

Michelin had a lot of that infrastructure in place, and they wanted to bring business to auto repair shops all over France. They started advertising restaurants all throughout France in their guide. In other words, they created helpful content. And then what happened? Occasionally people popped their tire and they needed to go and have it serviced, and Michelin was a trusted brand for that. That's how the company grew their business.

The Michelin story is a cool one, but creating a restaurant guide doesn’t immediately square with selling tires, which is why there is often a dovetail of consciousness and people don’t often realize the guide and the tires are the same company. Ideally if you're helping people, the content you're creating is directly helping the people that would benefit from your product. And the more that you're helping, whether it's through content or the product proper or through your advertisements, the less it is a disruption. And if the way that you're helping is very much in line with what your brand is, people see it as one linear narrative as opposed to a convoluted one.

The Utility of Traditional Advertising

Often people watch the Super Bowl “for the ads,” because the ads that run during the Super Bowl are historically really funny, compelling, or interesting. People actually watch the ads as if they are content. 

I'm a student of advertising, and from time to time, I take a minute of my day to Google an ad and watch it. I opt in, because it brings me joy or I think it's really clever or interesting. One of my favorite ads is a NHL commercial called “No Words,” that uses found footage of speechless professional ice hockey players after they won the Stanley Cup. They're these big, tough guys that are broken down to tears and simply overcome with emotion. In 30 seconds, you see reporters shove their microphones into these players’ faces during all these historic wins, and the whole commercial is guys stammering and not really being able to answer. At the end, it says, “Sometimes there are no words,” and shows a picture of the Stanley cup. It sends shivers up my spine every time, because it’s a brilliant insight and it’s really emotional.

I also love really smart campaigns, which go beyond a momentary disruption. One particularly effective campaign came from Droga5, who were tasked with revitalizing the streetwear brand Ecko. Instead of using fancy equipment, they put the President’s seal on a 747, and hired a video guy with a small ‘90s camcorder to follow two guys pretending like they were going to tag Air Force One, the president's plane, with Ecko’s rhinoceros logo. Droga5 then leaked this video to the press, and the White House freaked out and had to double check that security hadn’t been breached and Air Force One hadn't been tagged. Essentially, the company created all this earned media and this frenzy about how two guys could have possibly snuck past security and graffitied Air Force One, the most secure airplane in the world. It was a stunt, but it was clever, and it wasn’t yet another boring disruption in our lives. It's something interesting, provocative, and exciting. 

There are hundreds of examples of effective advertising, but I think that's like not using the rote ideas that help shift the conversation. Most advertising is unpleasant for consumers because it stays within the confines of what is acceptable or what other brands have already done. And it's unpleasant for the people that work at the ad agencies that are doing the same ads every year. The whole industry is very soulless, unless people can make advertisements that are additive, that are interesting, that are compelling to consumers and the people that make the ads alike.

The Power of Telling Multiple Stories

Brands used to tell one story to everyone because the media buy was much less targeted. Maybe you knew that the TV channel Lifetime is watched mostly by women and Spike TV is watched mostly by men, but that's about as good as you could get in terms of targeting on television. As a result, there will still be a man sitting there on the couch watching a tampon ad. With Facebook ads that doesn't happen, because their algorithm is so sophisticated. I don't get tampon ads ever. Why would I? 

Now, brands can tell different stories to different people, and the modern media landscape is very much informed by the data that we have on consumers: Who they are, where they are, and what they like enables brands to tell stories that are very catered to the customer, as opposed to just broad spectrum ads, where you sort of the hope that by and large, you appeal to most people that watch it. 

You need to be willing to try multiple ads until you have an ad that's profitable, and is returning money. Product-market fit is defined in a lot of different ways, but a key metric is whether you have customers returning again and again and again. Until you’ve hit pay dirt and found product market fit, try different messaging and different target audiences. It’s when you start to find that people are really coming back and your messaging is really resonating that then, and only then should you double down with that particular message for that target audience. 

Knowing Which Conversations Your Company Should Join

While content marketing is a bit of a Trojan horse to sell consumers more product, the trend we're seeing is that brands need to be more and more and more helpful to resonate with their intended consumer. Ideally they are genuinely, authentically helpful, because how you truly act as a brand is increasingly transparent when you factor in the internet’s sounding board. People aren’t afraid to call bullshit on brands, and cancel culture will come to strike if you're trying to own conversations that you do not have the right to own. 

After Peloton released its holiday ad, it was pretty uniformly ridiculed on the internet. I think their downfall was that they ascribed to an older model of advertising. Even though they're a trendy company, they and their agency made ads the old way, which is that they decided what they wanted to say, rather than listening to what consumers wanted. They misread the room and, and guessed wrong as to what consumers wanted to hear. And they got slapped pretty hard for it. 

Decades ago, you could tell whatever story you wanted and the brand and the ad agency were in control of the narrative. The consumer couldn’t give feedback, whether through Amazon reviews or Twitter. But cancel culture and its many forms and its many channels exist now, and brands can no longer tell stories that they had no right to tell.  

The big lesson to learn from that debacle is Ryan Reynolds’s decision to hire the same actress who starred in the Peloton commercial to make an ad for Aviation Gin. He participated. He heard what consumers were saying, and he joined the conversation as a peer, as a consumer, and as someone riffing off of the distasteful ad. I think in the future you'll see fewer and fewer brands saying, “Here's the story we want to tell.” It will be much more about what consumers want to hear, and how brands can very carefully tell that story to them. 

But if you're telling a story about how cool it is to smoke, people are going to call you out on the fact that smoking kills people. Or if you're talking about the Black lives matter movement and you haven't walked the walk, you're going to get called on that. 

Brands need to be really careful about not acting like brands, not like appropriating conversations, and not trying to tell stories that don't align to how they have existed as a brand. Their brand messaging needs to be consistent in how they've conducted themselves with their employees, with their customers, and with their products historically. There's a lot of pressure on brands nowadays to walk the walk because if they don't, a light's going to be shown on that lie. And if you can’t walk that walk, perhaps it’s better to sit that conversation out — and ask yourself what your company can do as a whole so that next time you can join the conversation in a meaningful way.

The Next Great Advertising Frontier Is Simply Helping People

I predict that in the next five years, the things you see in banner ads on your Facebook or Instagram feed will feel more and more like helpful recommendations than ads. You’ll say to yourself, “Oh, I like that dress,” or “I have been meaning to go to Japan. And that cheap plane ticket is actually interesting to me.” These ads will be helpful insofar as they actually target a need that you have. 

If you wear contact lenses and you need to renew your prescription once every six months, and at five and a half months your lens company sends you an email about scheduling an appointment, that's a helpful, friendly reminder. It’s no longer a disruption, in which you're like, “Get outta here, I have no interest in this.” Increasing ads can just be a curated list of things that you actually want or need. 

Thanks to its algorithms, Facebook and other social media sites know us better than we could ever know ourselves. Brands can mimic this knowledge with progressive profiling, or by asking customers to take a survey, so that they can then only send those customers emails that hit their persona on the head. They know gender, age, what they're interested in, why they like the product, and so on. The more efficient the advertisement, and the more the advertisement contains information that the consumer will find useful to their life, the more you can retrain people to respond positively to your product. 

An inefficient use of ads becomes a nuisance to some people, who will then stop paying attention to a certain type of ad. In the coming years, media channels that are hyper-targeted will not be viewed as ads, but instead as help. And if they're viewed as help, I would argue that they're no longer ads, even though it might generate a purchase. 

It’s sort of dystopian, and for some people it's incredibly violating that the internet understands us more and more and more, and therefore can surface things to us better and better and better. Other people welcome that sort of bespoke fitting of the entirety of the world coming to their doorstep. It’s important to think about which camp you fall into, because one day soon we’ll be talking to friends and brands on the same footing and we’ll still be sold things, but only the things that we want or are helpful to us. That also asks a much deeper question about the difference between need and want. At some point, that distinction will become the new frontier, and I believe that when people are shown things that they really want but don’t need, it won’t be seen as a disruption so much as an intrusion. 

I think we’re all starting to ask the questions of what is it that we really need to be happy to be ourselves? “Who am I exactly?” The internet is trying to ask those larger, existential questions about us right now, too. So when I get shown an ad for something, whether or not I find that ad to be helpful or intrusive has a lot to do with how well I know myself. The future of the internet, and by extension, advertising, will make us ask questions about consumerism and what is it that we actually need versus what actually brings us happiness and utility. 

That future excites me, because I know myself. But let me ask you this: Does it excite you, or terrify you?