Digital Advertising is Broken. How Do We Fix It?
Tags: Digital Marketing, Advertising, Social Media, Digital Life, Word Of Mouth Marketing

You’re watching a “10-minute ABS 🔥🔥🔥” workout video on Youtube. Three minutes in an ad suddenly pops up, allowing you to collapse and take a breather.

We’re willing to wager this is the only time you’ve been glad to see an advertisement.

In any other instance, advertisements are exasperating. They constantly force themselves upon us, trying to wedge in between our attention spans. Popular Chrome Extensions like AdBlock exist solely to prohibit advertisements from pestering us.

This is because usually, advertisements aren’t in context with what we’re looking for.

Digital advertising operates on the interruption-based ad model. You click on a video, and then you’re forced to watch something that has nothing to do with the content. In short: ads make money by blocking your intention.

In this scenario, everyone loses. A frustrated consumer is force fed something they didn’t ask for. The content creator begrudgingly relies on the process because they need to make money from ad-watch time. And in the end, everyone views advertisers as untrustworthy and annoyingly persistent.

It’s a broken system, but we don’t know how to digitally advertise in any other way.

Or do we?

What is the Interruption-Based Ad Model, and Why Doesn’t it Work?

The interruption-based ad model is everywhere in the digital landscape.

If we flip through Instagram stories, we’re hit with an ad. When we click on a Youtube video, we must endure a five-second clip before we can watch the content. When listening to a podcast, we fast-forward the sponsored segment.

Attention is a scarce asset. Advertisers know this, which is why they try to capitalize on the moment a viewer readily anticipates giving away their attention.

Interruption marketing is the traditional model of product awareness. The goal is to inject the ads’ information while a viewer is voluntarily listening.

The problem here is that advertisers don’t contribute any value. All they’re doing is stealing a viewer’s precious attention span while it’s readily available.

People Don’t Trust Ads That They Didn’t Ask For

Granted, there are upsides to this sort of marketing model. If a company’s goal is to only expose their message to as many people as possible, it’s a viable way to go about it. It can reach a mass audience and target new potential customers.

Yet, this doesn’t balance out the considerable downsides.

Let’s say you’re at a restaurant. You want to try the caesar salad, so you ask the waiter about it. They launch into their weekend plans and how stoked they are for their new Peloton bike. You’re irritated because well, you didn’t ask. You wanted to know about the salad, and instead you’re forced to listen about Peloton, which you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy.

Above all, do you trust your waiter? Probably not, because they aren’t listening to you. This applies to advertisements. Around 70% of people don’t trust a brand’s advertising, and less than 5% pay attention to an interruptive message.

People Still Want to Have Connections to the (Right) Brands

After these discouraging statistics, you’d think here’s the part in the article where we tell advertisers to give up.

Here’s the thing. People still want to connect to brands. In fact, 78% of people want brands to use social media to connect them together. The idea is to act as a connector first, and then sellers second.

Companies want to use advertisements to raise awareness about their product or service. We get that.

They’ve created something amazing and want the world to know about it. Yet, allocating a massive marketing budget to broadcast ads to as many people as possible isn’t sustainable. All they’re doing is annoying more people.