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Hitting back at ad avoidance (0)

 

It’s got to be the non-surprise of the century: the reason people don’t like junk mail is that it doesn't interest them, reports TiVo.

TiVo didn’t actually say that “we shouldn’t show people adverts they don’t want to see”, but it did hint at it. Using phrases like “new insights that were unimaginable only a few years ago”, Tracey Scheppach of Starcom – which is partnering with TiVo on an advertising research tool called the PowerWatch Consumer Panel – said: “New viewing behaviours revealed by correlations between household demographic, product category and ad fast-forwarding shows that while everyone is fast-forwarding through ads, effective message delivery can help make an ad resonate more.”

So: when are we going to start sending people the ads they want to see? And not just on their set-top boxes, but in stores, and by the bus stop? Or as an ad-agency exec might pose the question, how do we con people into looking at ads they don’t want to see?

Half the skill of really clever creative campaigns is exactly that. Nobody needs brown water with bubbles in it, but advertising has made Coke and Pepsi Cola the brand powers they are.

But the lessons learned by the advertising industry may not be the ones TiVo is trying to teach. What TiVo has shown is that yes, people skip adverts – but also, they eagerly watch adverts that are relevant to them.

For out-of-home screen media, the lesson surely has to be that we need the sort of user data TiVo can offer its advertisers. We have to find ways of identifying the specific viewer, not just the demographic.

This means that we aren’t just going into DIY stores and showing videos of people buying plant pots, on the vague grounds that they might reach the same people. It means we are actually tracking their loyalty cards as individuals, and finding ways of working out which aisle they are pushing their carts down, and predicting what they are likely to need next.

Take someone who has purchased drill bits, a saw and rabbit food; do they actually have a rabbit cage already? Maybe they are the sort of person who could be tempted to buy the new, giant, multi-storey rabbit mansion? Or a rabbit security system (or even a rabbit cookbook)? Or planks and wire mesh? Or are they a doting grandmother, ready for adverts about cuddly rabbit toys?

TiVo-type user data would make sure we knew which person was interested in what. Cellular-phone data would give us a fix on where they are, to within ten feet. Loyalty-card data would let us know their purchasing patterns as well as their current interests. Computer data mining would make the entire process utterly painless and virtually cost-free.

So the problem of “which adverts do you skip?” isn't a problem – it's a powerful tool. If people skip a particular advert, don’t show it them! If you can spot the ones they stop and look at, show them more like those. How hard is the principle to grasp?

We need billboards that recognise individual buyers. We need Web servers which spot the particular surfer. And we need to make the audience understand the value, not just to us, but to them, of giving us access to all this data.

It all boils down to grabbing the “privacy” idiom by the neck, and understanding the real differences between genuine intrusiveness, and “providing a helpful service”. And the tools to nip the ad-blocking trend in the bud are within our grasp. All we need, frankly, is a few industry leaders with the courage to use them. 

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