by Gau Narayanan. A lot has been written about the importance of gathering, analysing and using data to give the customer exactly what she wants. And rightly so. This approach allows marketers to understand the customer better, add value to her life and efficiently drive audiences down a purchase funnel. However, a maniacal focus on the data alone is leading to us forget about the human at the end of those programmatically served eye balls.
Primary marketing challenge
This is important, because our primary marketing challenge is to tackle one thing and one thing alone: mass indifference. Assuming people are open to being converted assumes people are open to our messages; they’re not. They go about their lives pursuing what matters. And what matters today has always mattered: the basics of the Maslovian hierarchy — food, shelter, finances, family, friends, social mobility and self-worth [don’t forget internet access these days — ed-at-large]. Brands won’t matter unless they help people realise these hopes and dreams.
Don’t kid yourself that people care about your brand. Here’s a simple test: If Apple somehow fell prey to an Enron-esque scandal and foreclosed tomorrow, would the millions of fanboys go back to writing with a pen and a paper? Would they mourn the loss of a fantastic, creative company like the loss of a family member? Or would they would simply move on with their lives? Studies by the Ehrenberg Bass institute also show that, despite $billions invested to develop a differentiated positioning, people don’t see it, and feel that brands are substitutable.
If you can’t avoid them, block them
To further prove this apathy to marketing, we can look at ad blocking, which is becoming an industry in its own right. In a survey conducted by PageFair, in December 2016, over 615m devices were running ad-blocking software globally, a 30% YOY growth. It’s been there on your TV with your PVR (be honest: how many of you watch your own ads, let alone are able to stop family members skipping?); it’s on pre-rolls; and soon, through software, the public will be able to block ads completely on their devices. There’s also been talk of blocking ads at the network level, by UK networks EE and O2, due to the compromised user experience and data costs caused by the slow-loading programmatic advertising.
The masses have spoken — they are sick of terrible advertising, sick of spam, sick of junk mail. And this has been the case from day dot. People took themselves off the phone list, off direct mailing lists, off emailing lists and now they have the power to block advertising using ad-blocking software.
Beating the blocker
However, people still want brands to entertain them, make them laugh, make them cry and add value to their lives. Whether it’s through a film, through an experience, through a game, an act of kindness or through a coupon if you understand what people want and deliver a great experience, with the right message at the right time, they will let you in and reward you with patronage.
Film
Experience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_larVGi5J0
Game
Act of kindness
Coupon
So how do we go about combating indifference and active avoidance?
Schools of thought
There seems to be two schools of thought:
Programmatic conversion
The first focuses on adding value through programmatic conversion. Using data, algorithms and the power of programmatic to serve audiences ever more-relevant messaging to help close the deal. This messaging is based on using machine learning to understand peoples’ online and offline behaviour, where they are in the buying cycle, their location, and their platform and device. Sure, the technology is currently clunky, inaccurate and irritating (notice how advertising for a car follows you around the internet right after you’ve just bought one!), but Moore’s Law tells us that this will get better and quickly. Very soon, we’ll understand our consumer so well, nudging them toward the sale will feel seamless to them.
Mass consideration
The other is to focus on people, not just pixels, by creating value through mass mattering. Tell them why your brand exists in the world, why it should be noticed, remembered and bought. Be empathetic, insightful and matter, en masse. Enter popular culture with a bang; more importantly, become popular culture. Have a view, drop to one knee, stand for something or stand against something. Understand human nature, understand what matters and authentically enter the conversation. I call this mass consideration, because it builds aspirational value and salience at scale.
Person before pixel
I’m sure you’ll have a view on which school to follow. My view is that we need embrace complexity and do both. The sweet spot is where the two meet and I’ve labelled this personalised mass mattering. This is when the pixel and the person are equally understood. If we do this and get our distribution right, the right message will be served at the right time.
But there is an order effect.
I believe we do need to start with understanding the person and their hopes and dreams. When we start to matter, people (subconsciously) let us in, and our branded messages turn up on the news, on TV shows, in the music charts, and this fame causes the brand to be talked about, tweeted about, and shared through memes and gifs on WhatsApp. The data from Peter Field and Les Binet’s analysis shows that this fame results in sales, because it’s only when people care and overcome indifference that they’re most open to being converted.
After 13 years at AMVBBDO in London, Gau Narayanan came to South Africa to become MD of Net#work BBDO and regional director for BBDO Africa in December 2014. His monthly “Unorthodoxy” column on MarkLives questions the orthodoxy of how we thought marketing and advertising worked, looking instead at best practice from the world of behavioural economics, neuroscience and data from the IPA that shows us how marketing and communications works and how it can help the business.
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