Steal This Idea: The Public Banner Ad
Although a contemporary person, I did something about a year ago to rejoin civilization in one form: I bought a digital antenna for my television. And for the first time in years I was able to view non-targeted ads. One such ad was an incredibly manipulative spot for the SPCA with the most skilled dramatic dog actors I've ever seen.
Another ad that presented itself to me serendipitously was for a dating site called "Farmer's Only" with a middlebrow-sounding jingle "at Farmers Only Dot commmmm!" Inside my micro-targeted phone scrolling and laptop-staring silo I wondered if it was secretly a dating site for white supremacists. But once I met up with an old friend for lunch -- a friend I fear I have little in common with lately -- the conversation lifted as we together discovered we'd both seen the Farmer's Only ad and puzzled over whether this truly was a dating site for farmers. This friend had moved to another state and it was great to be able to connect over this discussion.
My friend said the site allows users to self-select into different groups of livestock. We shared a laugh and whenever the ad comes on I watch it.
Geico too produced a set of ads I enjoyed in this brief sojourn into reception television (as opposed to targeted television, coming soon since the FCC approved the "NextGen TV" technology in late 2017.) They continued the theme I'd last seen them use I think as far back as 2009, but the jokes and characters had evolved. I laughed out loud. I am a Geico customer and these ads made me feel part of the culture, which can be a challenge when you're a coder and tutoring kids in a disruptive era working out of your small city.
Yesterday's post on "Why Ad Tech Can't Build Brands (Yet)" repeated a phrase "over time" that reminded me of a lesson on second dates from a very highly recommended dating book I read once. The dating book's authors had done meticulous research on couples who had married, asked each spouse separately to describe how they met and courted, and then divided to the reader the dating/courtship process across all married couples down into common phases. At the beginning the phases are granular date one, date two, etc. What the book said about date number two fascinated me and was advice I used in job interviews and other endeavors.
The purpose of date two is to ensure that your second impression matches your first impression. Date two was practically an anomaly among all the dating phases in the entire book.
As with date two, it is with brand advertising campaigns: they have to evolve, but reassure the viewer "over time" they're the same company they were before.
Some time after date two, a person can introduce their significant other to friends and family. Because she can be confident the person she's introducing to her friends is the person she's seen "over time." As Simler, the tech blogger who inspired Ad Contrarian's podcast documented in yesterday's post, said, public-facing product ad campaigns need not only to entice the consumer, but to reassure:
"Maybe I'm comfortable associating myself with a beach-vibes beer. But if I'm worried that everyone else has been watching different ads ('Corona: a beer for Christians'), then I'll be a lot more skittish about my purchase."I don't want to get too into advertising philosophy on this blog. I'm focused on the overlap "neap tide is our beat." But I do intend to focus on media. Ads are an overlooked part of media and as yesterday's post discovered, our culture beyond media.
A public banner ad that signals to web users it's a non-targeted ad, and therefore viewed by everybody within a social or geographic sphere, would be embraced. As it is now, and moreso every successive month in this techlash year of 2018, ads are seen as stalkers we run from.
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
