Picture yourself on a Sunday, sitting in front of your television watching football. A commercial break comes on, and you see a commercial. It’s a fine commercial, advertising something that you might need at some point in the near future. Then there’s a different one, but suddenly the same commercial you just watched plays again. Then the game’s back on, but a player gets hurt on the first play, so you’re sent back into another commercial break where you see the exact same commercial.
What do you do? You probably flip to the other game.
Impressions are a good thing, but bad impressions aren’t. And there are ways when your marketing can actually become more of a hindrance to making sales than actually helping you.
Drowning in Ads
There are hundreds of thousands of advertisements broadcast across the television, posted in every periodical we read, and hanging alongside the roads on our morning and evening commutes. Some areas are so saturated with advertisements that hip waders wouldn’t help you through. And now with services like TiVo, many people are just fast-forwarding through the commercials anyway. When you throw your hat into that ring, you’re competing for the attention of a bunch of people who don’t have a very long attention span. You’re competing for people who are numb to billboards.
There are so many new ways that marketers are using to reach customers, but first and foremost you have to know where your customers are. Are they the ones sitting in front of the TV on football Sunday? Or are they out doing yard work and listening to Pandora radio on their smartphone? Finding new ways to reach your customers is part of the fun of the industry.
Marketing by Design
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t advertise through those channels anymore—quite the opposite. Like anything, good design (that is, not just visual design) can help marketing stand out. It might be time to try other media for advertising opportunities, or mix it up a little bit. Stretch your creativity some. Not every commercial needs to be a hard sell. Think of Geico’s recent Hump Day spot: it’s become a sensation. Of course, Geico has the benefit of serious brand recognition, but they haven’t been afraid to push the bounds of commercials to the absurd—and it’s usually worked. Giving your marketers a little extra figurative space to let their creativity fly a bit might give you some good results.
Maybe, in a land awash with boring billboards for car lots, you design something that stands out and promotes the passenger in a car (not the driver, not then anyway) to visit your site on their smartphone. Maybe you opt for an interactive YouTube video to engage with people.
There are too many new ways to communicate and interact with one another to get stuck in a marketing style that doesn’t work for you. Explore and create and let them come to you.
