By Orla O’Connor

WWGD

In honour of Steve Harrison coming in next week I’ve been reading up on Gossage. Gossage is Steve inspiration, and any inspiration of a mentor is equally an inspiration of mine so it’s good to know who they are. So I found What Happened to Advertising (What Would Gossage Do) by Massimo Moruzzi in the library and gave it a quick read. Here’s my takings from that book (Part 1).  

Gossage seems awesome.

Interactive advertising – Why would someone want to interact with an ad? When you say it out loud it seem stupid, I don’t watch 4oD for the ads, in fact the ads get in my way and I’m an advertising student, just imagine how the public feel.

There are 2 main things advertisers forget. Firstly their audience is not their audience. It’s a borrowed audience from something else. Advertisers are paying a price for the privilege of being there. Never be fooled ads are the person who isn’t invited to the party. Secondly people are engaged with what ever they are doing which rarely translates to they are engaged with the ad. Take facebook when your ad starts playing on the page, while I’m looking at the message above that I do actually care, about that counts as engagement. Even though I couldn’t give 2 monkeys if your ad was there or not.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Make stuff relevant. Don’t talk to a 16 year old girl about menopause it doesn’t make sense.

Stop pretending social media is memorable. “Click rates on banner ads is around 0.1%”. But I bet we all remember the John Lewis Ads from this Christmas. Video is still King.

THERE ARE TOO MANY ADS. The world is saturated and as we can all agree most ads are (insert a lot of swear words here). So not only does your ad get compared to the content of the place you’ve placed, it also get’s compared to all the crap ads that’s around it.

Ads are not communities. I don’t rush to Facebook to tell the Honda page that I had broccoli for lunch, and I don’t read or care what else someone posts on there. I only joined that page so I could try and win a free car and if I remember that I’d joined I would probably exit that community pretty sharpish.

“Saying ‘We’re on Facebook’ or ‘Follow us on Twitter’ must be the dumbest thing of the decade. They’re already on your website. Why send them away?” (page 27) Preach!! Most companies just don’t want to deal with comments and complains on their website so they push them to sites where people complain about stuff all the time so they can hide behind the sea of complaining. If you have great customer service though, why not demonstrate that on your website. Let people get involved on the real thing.

“To sum it up: Instead of attracting people to your website by being interesting to the point they will want to share your content via social media, you do the opposite. You send your users away from your website to social networks run by other companies where the best you are able to do is to push your boring marketing messages. If they don’t travel, you push harder. Instead of relying on word-of-mouth, you shove it down their throats. Best of all, you call it ‘conversations’” (page 29)

That’s right folks so much wisdom and only on page 29 tune in next time for the next lot. Have a good day.