FillerDmon said:
Lilani said:
Personally I work in marketing, and though my department specializes in TV ads, and things like DVR, Netflix, and even people distracting themselves during commercial breaks with smartphones and tablets and such are of great concern to us.
I ask this because I am -genuinely- curious as heck. What could you possibly do about that? If people don't want to be bothered by Adds, to the point of outright ignoring them by accessing other addless content until the add is over, as concerning as that might be for the people who work on the adds, I don't think I remotely see a way around that.
If someone doesn't want to be affected by an add, well, ain't that just the breaks? Doesn't seem like there's much you can do to fix that; the net is proof enough that attempting to do anything more forceful ends up making a lot of people want to actively reject it...
To answer your first question, there's really nothing we can do about it other than adapt. Keep our eye on our customer base, keep track of what appeals to them and what doesn't, watch sales numbers in relation to our ad campaigns, test our ads against focus groups to see what appeals to them and why. And also begin to branch out to other forms of advertisement, which I will fully admit my company is very behind on. We have a minimal number of web ads, and our social media feels like it's being run by 40 year olds who are pretending they know how to run social media. Actually, that has more to do with the higher-ups trying to tell the social media team what to do rather than letting the social media team come up with and execute their campaigns...but that's another problem altogether.
Some marketing firms have tried to sue telecommunications companies that offer automatic ad-skipping on their DVR services, but if I recall correctly nothing came of it. And I doubt nothing ever will, with basic cable slowly moving out of relevance anyway. At this point it's better worth the marketing firms' money to look to the future than to fight for a dying audience, and it's better worth the telecommunication firms' money to keep making things more convenient for users and remain relevant for as long as possible.
To answer your second question about people not wanting to be affected by ads, that is something we keep in mind a lot when making our ads. The company I work for specializes mostly in sporting goods, so sometimes we are at odds as to whether we should make ads which have very specific people in mind (hunters, hikers, fisherman, etc.), or general ads which can appeal to a wider range (basic men's and women's clothes, kid's toys, etc). But typically the argument is settled by simply saying, "Look, there are people who are looking for sporting goods, and people who aren't looking for sporting goods." Our ads aren't meant to convince non-sporting people to buy sporting goods, it's to sell us as one of the best sporting-good retail chains out there. The best we can do is offer the greatest range of the products we specialize in to appeal to those within our market.
Now, we DO have events that take place in stores to try and get non-sporting people interested in trying things such as hunting, fishing, and hiking. But those are handled very differently from our ads which specialize in specific products. Our social media team has been trying to take over the bulk of promotions involving those events, with lukewarm success. Again, in that respect, what my particular company needs is a changing of the guard in our higher-ups.
