Fighting Invisibility
How much content do we skim by or skip through on a daily basis? Some studies say we are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 branded messages every single day. This includes each billboard, sign, brochure, TV or Radio commercial, every email, and every coupon. Most major movies include product placement and if you follow any type of influencer, from athletes to make-up gurus, chances are they have probably recommended you some product or brand in the past. Ads are omnipresent within our social media networks, from being the first 5 seconds of every YouTube video to following you around from page to page.
However, even though the ad exposure is so high, we notice or really pay attention to very few of them. We are so used to them being everywhere that we just sort of tune them out, like how our brain usually ignores our nose from our field of view because we are used to it. When it comes to not noticing advertising, the concept is usually referred to as banner blindness and it comes from all the web banners we see on the internet. The idea is that the vast majority of advertisements out there are not attention-worthy because we’ve already seen thousands of similar versions before. Our brains are just bored of the same things over and over again.
A very common path of action when it comes to choosing your marketing strategy is to look at what others in your own industry are doing and then try to follow in their footsteps. This will inevitably make your advertising or your brand feel similar to theirs, which in turn makes your brand stand out less. The idea isn’t to blend in but to stand out.
As marketers, our job is to fight this invisibility for our brands. We combat this banner blindness by communicating with customers in new, and unexpected ways, by showing them something different, something worth sharing, something funny, or useful. The idea is to stimulate our audience’s emotions in a way that doesn’t just get them to notice us but to remember us.
The easiest example that comes to mind is Coinbase’s Superbowl ad. It was just a floating QR code bouncing around on a black screen for 30 seconds. That was it! No celebrities, no over-the-top film production, no jokes, and no logos. With most Superbowl ads featuring famous actors and crazy special effects, Coinbase’s ad stood out completely from every other traditional commercial that aired that day. The Superbowl audience had to face a 30-second spot of a mysterious QR code bouncing around the screen, this is gasoline for curiosity. Millions of fans around the US grabbed their phone, as they already usually do during commercials, and scanned the code to solve the mystery. In turn, Coinbase’s website had so much traffic that day that it crashed. The ad performed so well that the Coinbase app rose almost immediately to the top of the app store. All of this by doing something untraditional.
Even though marketing is 50% business, it’s also 50% art. We need to allow ourselves to have fun and try new things. Creativity is the last unfair advantage any company can have over one another. So invest in creativity, it’s an economic multiplier.