One of the more memorable scenes in the movie Gladiator is when the hero Maximus, disgusted with the need to kill for the crowd, throws his sword into the amphitheater seats crying, “Are you not entertained?” However, perhaps the more telling question for advertisers is Maximus’ next question, “Is this not why you are here?”
Maximus knows full well why the crowd is there. The crowd wants more than just to see a gladiator kill, they want to get caught up in the drama – they want the thrill of the kill and Maximus gives it to them. As Proximo explains,
“I wasn’t the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me.”
Like a successful gladiator, advertising must win the crowd to be effective. Effective advertising has always engaged people’s emotions to gain a few seconds of attention, and by doing so left an impression of a brand that they might otherwise ignore. Many of today’s strongest brands were built by offering entertainment in exchange for a few seconds of people’s time.
Today, however, advertising technology has allowed advertisers to decouple ad exposure from emotion by using more intrusive ad formats. Trying to watch clips from the Gladiator on YouTube forces me to attend to a pre-roll video, and then later Call-To-Action Overlays (even if my attention is immediately directed at closing them as quickly as possible). These are relatively benign compared to the pop-ups and inRead ads that haunt the pages of some my favorite sites. Instead of engaging my emotions to get my attention, these formats ambush my attention. As a result, I am left annoyed and with no idea of which brand was featured.
In an interview with Warc, Ilya Vedrashko, SVP/consumer research at Hill Holliday, states,
“I think a lot of demand for ad blockers comes from our over-eagerness to engage somebody, and to bother them, and to make them to pay attention to us.”
By my definition, you do not engage people by shoving ads in front them irrespective of their goals and desires. That is interruption, not engagement. You engage people by offering them something worth their time when and where they want it. The problem with the advertising industry today is that it has forgotten to ask why its audience is there. What do they want from the experience? Far from winning the crowd it is losing it. But that’s just my opinion. What do you think? Please share your thoughts.
Written by Nigel Hollis,Executive Vice President and Chief Global Analyst at Millward Brown