by Martin MacGregor (@MartMacG) Clickbait.
It’s not a great experience, being tempted by an intriguing headline and then finding your destination to be very different to what you expected. But, in the race for views, websites and newsfeeds are becoming peppered with headlines that aim to stop you in your tracks and motivate you to click.
More and more provocative
I subscribe to The Telegraph in the UK, a reasonably conservative newspaper and website, and I am fascinated to watch every day as the headlines become more and more provocative — and how generally they move up to the top of the page as the data shows how clicked they are.
Behind the success of clickbait lies basic psychology. According to studies, it all comes back to curiosity and deprivation. The headline is engineered in a way that maximises reader curiosity. As important is that gnawing feeling that, if you don’t click, you will never know what the content was.
As brands play more and more in the content space, clickbait has naturally become part of their communication mix.
Brands and clickbait
In fact, brands have been using clickbait forever. A call to action in a store window or in a newspaper has always been aimed at generating curiosity. The only difference is that, instead of a click, it requires an actual store visit to satisfy the deprivation. Whether there is any more stock left of the item promoted, or whether the wording of the promotion is misleading, is frustrating but generally accepted as part of the consumer experience.
However, something like a Facebook-promoted post with a promotional offer actually solves this problem. It usually leads to an online purchasing environment where the offer can be immediately redeemed — nothing misleading and usually in stock.
More interesting is how brands are using clickbait to get consumers to engage with their content. And, as with news platforms, where their journalistic credibility is at the stake, for brands it talks directly to their authenticity as brands — and the increased potential of consumer disappointment.
The dark side
What is really happening here is the dark side of the race for perfect measurement. News platforms are being driven hard to deliver interactive readers to ensure they fall on the right side of the programmatic algorithm. It’s a fight for survival and the result is on-the-edge compromises.
Brands have a huge amount of scrutiny being put on the digital content they put out there. Ironically, while the hundreds of millions of rands spent in traditional TV, radio and print do have measurement underpinning them, they still involve a large amount of assumption — the obvious result of sample-based research.
This scrutiny means there is a lot of pressure on headline success. I have seen one piece of content have up to 20 headlines submitted with it, each one tested until the ‘most-clickable’ one is selected. And guess which one that is? The one which maximises intrigue and which generally has the most tenuous link to the actual content. It’s a dangerous place for a brand to be.
Finding the right balance
So, yes, what happens next could be awful. Let’s hope that, in every brand discussion, the right balance between what the data says and what the brand stands for is found. The quest for click volume will be meaningless if consumers start to lose faith in a brand because of it.
Martin MacGregor (@MartMacG) is managing director of Connect, an M&C Saatchi Company, with offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Martin has spent 18 years in the industry, and has previously worked at Ogilvy and was MD of MEC Nota Bene in Cape Town. He contributes the monthly “Media Redefined” column, in which he challenges norms in the media space, to MarkLives.com.
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