Advertising as content: reaching the remote consumer

Advertisers develop content to cloak messages to reach wary consumers

Marketing

By Allie Sanchez

As internet adoption becomes more ubiquitous, there is an increasing awareness among advertisers that consumers are becoming harder to reach with traditional marketing means.

Consider: there are ad blockers on the internet, viewers are cutting cable subscriptions, and eyeballs are avoiding print and TV ads.

Brad Jakeman, PepsiCo president for global beverage group, noted that advertising has gained the reputation of being “pollution content”, thus challenging advertisers to create content that consumers want.

A GfK MRI survey last year said nearly 50% of the 24,000 of the US consumers surveyed said that much of the advertising is “way too annoying”. 
This evolution of behaviour has caused advertisers to rethink their approach to pushing their products.

Part of the current playbook is dressing up advertising as content in the hopes of passing through the filter of what consumers watch, read, and listen to.

Digital marketing is attractive to advertisers because it promises to target consumers with more precision. But the huge number and intrusive nature of internet ads and the use of ad blockers is forcing them to change tactics.

So called “native ads” are becoming popular as they seamlessly blend into a user’s feed and are more difficult to distinguish from content
Coldwell Banker Real Estate reported that native ads have 50% higher click through rates compared to banner inventory, resulting in the shift of dollars from display advertising to native ads.

Native ads are also more effective in the mobile space, where traditional banners do not perform well, the company further stated.
 

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