If you watched the NFL playoffs, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=”null”]how many of those commercials actually made you want to buy the product advertised? [/inlinetweet] The ad industry continues on a path towards irrelevance as brands fund ads that do nothing but pay the agencies for their time.
More than 200 million people are using ad blockers online, more people than ever are “cutting the cord” and yet most brands continue to turn out ads that are irrelevant, boring and a waste of money. Why? Because somewhere someone has convinced someone that an entertaining ad is going to make us buy the product.
The hype around the Super Bowl commercials has already started. The media will rate the ads and people will talk about them, but in the end most brands are going to blow $2 million on spots so that their agency people can go to Southern France to pat themselves on the back.
The real question that most seem to ignore is “does awareness translate into turning a prospect into a customer?”. The answer is, it depends but seeing a monkey on an eTrade commercial is not going to get me to become an eTrade customer.
Most creative people from ad agencies are frustrated Steven Spielberg’s. They convince clients to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create Super Bowl spots, then send clients press clippings about how great their ads were leaving the VP’s to explain to management why sales are still declining.
The “business” of the ad industry is slowly killing it. Too many of us are accountable to how we spend our money and spending $2 million on a Super Bowl spot is not smart. If they took that $2 million and invested it in great digital marketing they could actually see an ROI, but then they wouldn’t get to sit in a luxury box and drink with agency people who feed them a line of bullshit.
