• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, March 27, 2024

According to a report I saw published last week, the advertising industry is forecast to grow more than 5% next year.  That’s a lot of growth for an already enormous business, but what I find most interesting is that the growth is happening despite us not listening to our most important customers.  It’s all happening without reading the signals and the data from the audience.

The audience doesn’t really like how we do things.  Look at the data.  Click-through rates are at an all-time low.  Social media ad engagement is down.  People skip video ads by as much as +90% when given the chance.

 It even costs more to make an impact with search than it ever did before because people click less and there’s more competition, driving up prices.

All this info provides a clear signal that consumers don’t appreciate the way we deliver messages in their current format. And yet the industry dramatically over-indexes on talking about itself and how much we rely on data and insights to prove performance.

My suggestion to the ad industry is to follow our own advice.  Let’s stop navel-gazing and talking about ourselves long enough to hear what the audience is saying, so we can come up with some new ways to reach the audience in a more likeable format.

When I was an agency guy, the first rule was, never lead with your credentials or start a conversation by talking about yourself or your company.  You always listen first, ask good questions, and formulate a hypothesis that meets the needs of your customer.

The same should go for our industry.  Our primary consumers are clear they will do anything to avoid or ignore our ad formats, and yet we ignore that feedback.  Why are we not pursuing ways to be more effective with the money we spend rather than simply throwing more money at the problem?

Brands and agencies should be looking to innovate on new ways to deliver a message in a format that is less interruptive and more relevant -- and has the potential to be appreciated by the audience we are trying to speak to.

Interruption is the easy way to speak to them, but we can’t lean in on interruption forever, and also give them control over the experience in a way that allows them to skip or ignore it.  

Search is one of the biggest formats that needs a change, because of generative search.  Results will be spoon-fed to the audience in a more easily consumable format with no need to click to see numerous pages.  That creates an opportunity for new real estate alongside the generative results where a message can be delivered, and that message is highly targetable.

In video, pre-roll and post-roll are probably going to survive, but product placement and in-screen advertising or overlays are a fast-growing area (in full disclosure, this is where I focus my time).  These can’t be skipped or ignored, and in-game has proven its value.

Shoppable video is a hugely innovative area as well, turning video into a commerce engine that can generate activity immediately, whether in social media or beyond.

AI-customized display ads can be created and delivered in real time and baked into a campaign, working off IP address and not cookies, enabling display to be more effective in the coming years.

I also think we could see a return for things like interstitials as more sites simply become knowledge bases to be scraped by AI.  Experience in apps and video could become more reliant on an interstitial experience, and although interruptive, it could be used sparingly and with high a CPM to command engagement.

Innovation is where these additional ad dollars should be going -- innovation in creative delivery rather than simply data and efficiency.  The question should be, how do you make a splash -- versus, how do we continue to refine the target to a narrow point?

This is something we should be focusing on, don’t you think?