By Charles Lee Mathews. The advertising industry has long assumed that more exposure equals more influence. Experts say that thinking is now backfiring badly.
People are increasingly tuning out commercials, which they find annoying, according to new research from Gartner. The business and technology insights company found that 81% of consumers in the US aimed to ignore ads or increasingly treat them as background noise.
“People skip ads because they have been conditioned by years of broken value exchanges to expect that an ad will cost them something, time, focus, energy, and offer them very little in return,” says Dali Tembo, CEO and co-founder at The Culture Foundry Co.
“There is also a relevance problem that the industry has not honestly confronted. We have extraordinary targeting capabilities now. We can reach someone by postcode, behaviour, interest, or the specific device they are holding in their hand. And yet the experience of receiving an ad still feels generic to most people most of the time. That gap between what is technically possible and what is actually experienced by the human on the other side is where trust goes to die,” he says.
Humans want to live in the now
“People do not want to lose the moment they are in. Whether that is a YouTube video, a piece of news, a conversation with a friend, they are protecting their present experience. An ad that interrupts feels like a small theft. And the more it happens, the more the aversion grows,” says Tembo.
In Australia, Student Edge participated in a research project with 1,000 Australians aged 14 to 29 to gauge their perceptions of advertising. 81% said that they hated ads. Their two biggest gripes? Advertising interrupts their lives, and commercials don’t seem real.
Charlie Stewart, CEO of Rogerwilco, says the big problem is cognitive overload. “Ad avoidance is not just a media problem. It’s a far broader societal issue about trust, attention and cognitive load,” he says.
The density of noise
“We’re all living inside ridiculously noisy environments. Our devices are pinging 24/7 with group chats, news alerts, algorithmic recommendations and an endless stream of content. Ads are just one of the many distractions. I wouldn’t say we’re singling them out to ignore. Rather, for our own self-protection, we’re filtering pretty much anything that’s not critical,” Steward says.
“Cognitive overload is what happens when the volume of information a person is receiving exceeds their capacity to meaningfully process it,” says Tembo.
“The brain responds to this the same way it responds to any overwhelm: it starts cutting corners. It stops evaluating and starts dismissing. In that state, even a genuinely good message from a genuinely good brand will be discarded not because it was bad, but because there was simply no room for it,” Tembo explains.
Interruptive advertising breaks trust
Stewart says adverts are increasingly feeling like that unwelcome relative who pops in uninvited at Christmas. “There’s a growing trust deficit between brands and consumers. Like an overly familiar but not terribly popular relative, brands have become increasingly inappropriate and invasive in terms of what they say to us and when and where they say it,” he says.
“There used to be an understood social contract around advertising. Watching a couple of 30-second commercials during a 90-minute movie or flipping past 10 pages of ads in a 40-page magazine felt like a reasonable trade-off because the advertising sat within a clearly defined context,” says Stewart.
“What feels very different today is the intimacy and persistence of modern advertising. Social feeds that once centred on friends, family and personal moments are now constantly interrupted by highly targeted commercial messages. And because those ads are often fuelled by behavioural data, they can feel invasive rather than useful, which is the point at which advertising stops feeling like marketing and starts feeling like surveillance,” Stewart states.
Capturing attention versus earning respect
“For years, marketers believed the goal was to capture attention. I think the real challenge today is deserving it,” says Gareth McPherson, CEO of Wonder. “The brands that will thrive aren’t necessarily the loudest ones. They’re the ones that respect people’s time, simplify their lives and add genuine value to the moments they show up in,” he adds.
“Sometimes the kindest thing a brand can do is simplify. Just say one thing well. Make it easier to understand. Make it easier to decide. Make it easier to buy.
The brands that win are often the ones that remove friction from people’s lives rather than adding to it,” says McPherson.
Given the high degree of antipathy to advertising, what could advertisers do to heal the rift and to turn people on to advertising? “Cognitive kindness is the antidote. It is the practice of asking, before you send a single message,” says Tembo, who advises brands to ask if the commercial ask is proportional to the value being offered. “It sounds almost too simple to be serious strategic thinking. But I promise you it is,” says Tembo.
Cognitive kindness the way forward
“The brands that are winning attention right now are the ones that make it easy to understand them, easy to trust them, and easy to decide. They are reducing friction, not adding to it. They are writing shorter copy. They are using images that communicate instantly. They are showing up in contexts where their presence makes sense rather than forcing their way into contexts where it does not,” says Tembo.
Stewart, like Tembo, says that repairing ad avoidance is all about lightening the cognitive load people are experiencing. “Brands need to understand that people are not short of content, but we are incredibly short of mental bandwidth. What I find fascinating is that given the volume of messaging, you’d think advertisers believe that the more overloaded we are, the more persuadable we become, when the opposite is clearly the truth,” says Stewart.
“A bit more spatial awareness wouldn’t go amiss, and yes, I think people will favour cognitively kind brands, perhaps not always consciously, but behaviourally. I’d definitely be happy to spend more time with brands that feel useful, easy and respectful and in that context, cognitive kindness could become a distinctive brand asset because it creates emotional fluency,” he says.
At a time when more people are turning off advertising, the brands that will win are those disciplined enough to ask the hard questions before every campaign. Questions like: have we earned the right to this person’s attention? Are we simplifying life for our customers? In the future, cognitive kindness will become a strategic moat.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
