Strategies to Enhance Advertising Effectiveness in the Digital Era: Avoiding Losses from Advertisement Blocking
Advertising serves as a crucial tool for businesses to promote their products and services, enhance brand awareness, and attract customers. Therefore, advertising expenses are typically an integral part of the operational costs for both large corporations and small enterprises. When determining the method of placing advertisements, companies are highly concerned with the return on investment (ROI). They focus on metrics such as cost per mille (CPM), click-through rate (CTR), cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per download (CPD), cost per click (CPC), and conversion rate. These metrics help businesses evaluate the effectiveness of their advertising strategies and ensure that their marketing efforts yield profitable results.
In the current digital era, companies have a plethora of channels to run advertisements, including apps on smart devices. The proliferation of advertising platforms has significantly enhanced the ability of businesses to target their audiences with greater precision and efficiency. Despite these advancements, the perception of advertisements among users remains largely negative. Rather than viewing these advertisements as strategic efforts by businesses to engage with them, users often perceive them as intrusive and bothersome interruptions to their online experience. Consequently, individuals often exert considerable effort to avoid advertisements. To mitigate the prevalence of splash screen advertisements across various applications, users often resort to installing specialized blocking software. When it comes to web advertisements, certain blocker extensions are waiting for them. Regarding advertisements in video applications, users often opt to purchase premium memberships to reduce the frequency of advertisements. Such avoidance behaviours hinder companies that invest in advertising from realizing their anticipated returns. To counteract this, companies can implement the following strategies to alleviate user impatience with advertisements:
Native Advertising
Companies can utilize native advertising, a marketing strategy where advertisements are crafted to match the look, feel, and function of the platform on which they appear. Unlike traditional banner or display advertisements, native advertisements blend seamlessly into the platform’s content. This integration makes them less intrusive and more engaging for the audience.
In-feed advertisements are common in native advertising, but they do not define the entire concept. Native advertisements, tailored to fit various contexts, can be both diverse and engaging. For instance, Facebook’s survey and poll advertisements exemplify native advertising. Unlike traditional hard-sell advertisements, these interactive formats, which solicit consumer opinions or feedback, are more likely to foster user engagement and goodwill. Additionally, participants who complete these surveys or polls may receive small gifts from the advertisers, further enhancing the appeal. This interactive approach not only boosts user participation but also increases the overall effectiveness and attractiveness of the advertisements.
Moreover, the innovative application of native advertising can be seen in the popular Japanese game “Neko Atsume”. In this game, players’ cats occasionally bring back advertising posters. These posters are seamlessly integrated into the game’s daily interactions, making the advertisements feel like a natural part of the experience. Rather than finding these advertisements intrusive, users are charmed by the cats’ behaviour and become curious about the recommended products. This curiosity often leads them to download or try the advertised products. Such a form of advertising, which blends effortlessly with the game content, significantly enhances the acceptance and engagement of the advertisements.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a strategic approach that involves individuals with significant social media influence to promote brands, products, or services. These influencers, with their extensive reach and close connections with their followers, seamlessly incorporate brand messages into their content through soft articles, nuanced advertisements, or personal endorsements. This method is generally more favourably received by audiences and often proves to be more effective than traditional marketing techniques. A common example of this phenomenon is advertisements endorsed by celebrities with large fan bases. Such endorsements ensure that their devoted followers are less likely to skip or dismiss the advertisements, thereby enhancing the overall impact and reach of the marketing campaign.
leveraging User-generated Content
Employing user-generated content (UGC) to counteract ad-blocking is a highly effective strategy, as UGC is often perceived as more authentic and organic than traditional advertisements. Brands can stimulate the creation of UGC by organizing contests, offering incentives, or launching social media challenges, thereby generating a substantial volume of user-driven content. For instance, Lululemon’s #TheSweatLife hashtag motivates users to post their fitness photos and videos, thereby augmenting brand credibility and appeal through genuine user experiences. By embedding UGC into their websites and leveraging social media platforms, brands can adeptly circumvent ad-blocking software, ensuring their messages reach the intended audience while fostering increased engagement and trust.
In conclusion, companies must navigate the challenges of ad-blocking and user aversion to traditional advertisements in the digital era. By adopting the strategies mentioned before, companies can create more engaging and less intrusive advertising experiences and simultaneously maximize the return.
Hi Yunyi! Thank you for your impressive thinking and hypotheses, it also triggered me to think about what situation the advertising industry is in.
ReplyDeleteWhen recalling the offline, it seems that we don’t really feel annoyed about them (except for some who have content problems) even though they are also everywhere aside roads, on walls and in bus stations. The reason is that these offline advertisements won’t interrupt what we are doing or working on. For example, when we are on the way to meet friends, we won’t even stop for one second or take one glance at the advertisement posts on road light poles. Only people interested in them or have leisure time will watch them word by word, image by image, and these people usually don’t complain that these advertisements waste their time.
However, every advertisement online will really occupy your time and energy. For example, you are using your computer to search for a recipe for pasta with Google, and the title of the first result is “Let’s make the most delicious pasta ever”. You excitedly click it and wait for its loading, but after about ten seconds, you only see an advertisement page of a cooking app- and it even only can be installed on mobile phones. Then, people commonly feel teased and become dread. When you are scrolling through short videos for fun, you find an influencer’s video with a sensational opening which makes you believe this video will bring you an interesting story. After watching half of the video (five minutes), your expectations for the truth of the story have become higher and higher. Again, you finally find the whole story is only a foreshadowing for an advertisement. Can you control yourself not to roll your eyes in such a situation?
Although making advertisements reach as many people as possible is the duty of advertisers, such an overwhelming push to shove ads at people regardless of whether they need them is truly annoying. When people really don’t need a product, no matter how many times advertisements for it appear or how pretty the ad page/ post is, people won’t want to purchase and even feel bothered and have a bad impression of the product. In this situation, people are more like dustbins for ads and they can not feel their real demands are concerned. Advertising, which originally should aim at meeting customer needs and satisfaction, seems to have transformed into a psychological game of how to evade customer blocking.
May be a little pessimistic, but I think that people’s impatience and avoidance towards advertisements can not be significantly decreased anymore, since the omnipresent hidden ads, the automatic redirect to ad pages with just a slight shake of the phone, and the monotonous influencer advertising copy…all have long made people’s annoyance with ads unbreakable. Of course, my thinking is not to rain on someone’s parade. Practitioners in an industry can’t stop seeking solutions for the industry's problems, no matter how impossible or difficult it will be.
Again, thank you for your sharing and inspiration!
Hi, Yunyi, the ideas you shared with us are so close to my media exposure experience. From my very first years of Internet use, I did find advertisements intrusive and even annoying. The most direct reason is that it has nothing to do with the information I’m absorbing, thus suspending my immersive reading experience. During the early years of fixed computers, it could be dangling headlines with extremely bright colors. Afterward, advertisements on mobile apps even blocked the function keys so I was forced to click on them and then return with no willingness to look back.
ReplyDeleteThe strategies you have mentioned are systematic and comprehensive. As far as I’m concerned, native advertising, influencer marketing, and user-generated content hold several natures in common. First, reduce interruption and enhance advertising credibility. These strategies are all aimed at reducing the interruption of advertisements on the user experience and making advertisements more naturally integrated into users’ daily activities and content consumption. For example, native advertisements are seamlessly integrated with platform content, influencer marketing is recommended by trusted individuals, and UGC is displayed as real user content. Besides, increase user engagement. All strategies focus on increasing user engagement and interactivity. Native advertising attracts users through interactive forms, influencer marketing takes advantage of the interactive nature of social media, and UGC increases engagement by encouraging users to create and share content. Ultimately, circumvent blocking: Since these advertisement formats are more natural and interactive, they can more easily bypass users’ ad-blocking behaviors, ensuring that advertising messages can be effectively delivered to the target audience.
Advertisement is somehow a persuasive system targeting customers’ cognition, attitude, and behavior. Therefore, how to adopt measures to guide the whole psychological process of potential customers remains a pivotal question.
Thank you again for your enlightening insights!