Industry News

Are You A Valuable Advertiser or a Media Pest?

Quick trivia question, how many advertisements and brand messages is the average person exposed to each day?

The number that consistently pops up in numerous places and regularly gets referenced is 5,000 exposures per day. Pretty massive.

Even if it can be substantiated, 5,000 exposures sounds a bit much. But, theoretically it could be possible. With that in mind, we conjured up a more general phrase not tied to a specific number to answer the question. The phrase is, “A lot of freaking advertisements.”

Most everyone sees a lot of ads on a daily basis. Way more than they can possibly pay attention to and evaluate. For instance, just think about how many you’ve already seen today. Now think if there are any you actually remember.

WHAT’S THE HARM IN SEEING A LOT OF ADVERTISEMENTS?

We all experience it regularly. Often, multiple times per day. We’re simply minding our own business watching tv, reading email, surfing the internet, jamming to a great block of songs, checking the mail box, working to make a buck, and just living life. Then, BAM! Our attention gets interrupted and our intentions pushed aside by a multitude of ads promoting things we have little to no interest in at the time.

Whether it’s 5,000 or a few hundred ad exposures per day, one thing is for sure. The wrong ad at the wrong time is incredibly annoying. It’s simply an irrelevant, unwelcome pest many people don’t have much regard for. The more frequent and irrelevant the pest becomes, the more people can train themselves to disregard it and not pay attention. In turn, they can develop a behavioral pattern to stop paying attention almost completely and become much less likely to engage with an advertiser’s message even if they have an eventual need. Ultimately, yielding an extremely counter productive investment for the advertiser.

With this thought in mind, think about the type of advertiser your dealership may be. Do you deliver a valuable advertising message worthy of attention and action or is your advertising a frequent media pest doomed to the mental dungeons of obscurity and irrelevance?

WHY IT’S BETTER TO BE VALUABLE.

Advertising is disruptive. There’s no way around it. The trick for making advertising work well, even though it’s disruptive, is a simple idea. To be effective, ads need to be valuable to the audience they’re in front of.

A valuable ad in the presence of the right audience gets results. Even though it’s disruptive, it speaks to people in a way that can solve a need, frustration, or pain point. It’s in that solution the true value lies. Most people don’t like having problems. If the right solution is readily available to help solve a particular problem, people are more open to exploring how the solution can benefit them (even if the solution is disruptive). In the presence of the right audience, an ad can stop being viewed as a disruption to be avoided and instead be viewed as a fortuitous message to engage with.

The key to triggering higher advertising value and engagement is finding the right audience to be receptive of the message. That’s exactly where most advertisers fall short. They have a good product. They have a good message. The problem is, they’ve chosen to target and speak to an irrelevant audience. In turn, forcing an unwanted message upon an irrelevant audience leads to ineffective advertising.

Advertising works well for helping boost sales and support for just about anything. There’s thousands of brands, products, services, and organizations across the world who are proof of the success good advertising can create. The thing they all have in common is they know their audience. They know their audience’s problems, and they know which media will effectively get their solutions in front of their audience members with the right message at the right time. Instead of being incessant media pests with an annoying message that frequently interrupts and gets avoided, successful organizations create value with the right audience at the most opportune time their message will be received.

In today’s age of marketing data and intelligence, a car dealership can be as precise as it wants to be in efficiently targeting their ideal audience. The key is knowing which tools and media providers can deliver a highly targeted audience that is in need of the solutions a dealership can provide to solve their problems. Targeting the right audience with the right message isn’t just valuable to the people paying attention, it’s also incredibly valuable to a dealership’s bottom line. Done well, it will result in higher advertising response rates, vehicle sales, and return on investment.