How do you advertise when everyone skips the ads?

Skipping the ads is the norm online, but it presents even the youngest of viewers with an unusual problem: what products are out there?

I’ll give you an example.

My son is 11 years old this week and I asked him what he would like for his birthday?

His response was “I don’t know”.

So I asked if there was anything he had seen on TV that he liked the look of, the answer again was “No”.

It was a stupid question on my part because he mostly watches Netflix or YouTube where he just skips past the adverts.

So, in the age of catch-up TV and video-on-demand, how are we consuming adverts?

It doesn’t matter whether they’re for products or services, in the 21st century, how do we know who/what is available?

The norm: throw money at it… they will come

That’s how it used to be. Companies would throw a wad of cash at an advert and people will just do what the ad says. Do this, shop here, buy now or use us. The call to action.

It promotes immediacy – you should do this NOW!

But did it really work? How often now do we make a decision to hand over our hard-earned cash based on the “First Moment of Truth”?

The what now?

The First Moment of Truth is when you or I would make a decision to buy or use a service based on the first 3-7 seconds that we encounter a product or service.

Proctor and Gamble (which coined the phrase) has a video example. It shows in complete silence how the First Moment of Truth works. Have a think of how many times you do this?

We probably do this more when in the supermarket, but often we use online resources to determine what we buy or whose service we use. We use Google, we ask Facebook friends for recommendations and we read reviews. Jim Lecinski (a Google engineer) called this the “Zero moment of truth” – where you have made up your mind to spend your money not based on the product advert, but on what other people’s experiences are.

SEO, PPC, AdWords, etc, etc…

So, if we’re doing more online we have to play the game right. We’re now being led to discover products for ourselves because we skip the ads. It doesn’t matter if it’s on YouTube or banner ads at the sides, top and bottom of a web page. We’re almost programmed to skip them.

But what if a local business doesn’t know how to do search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) or AdWords? What if they don’t have the cash to spend on getting someone to help with all of that?

How will they get your attention now? me:now can help. Click here to find out more.