12 AD TACTICS YOU WERE LED TO BELIEVE WORK BUT DON’T

You’d think we’d know better. Over the past two decades we’ve been duped, deceived and deluded by a string of myths, mistruths and outright lies about the effectiveness of certain marketing tactics. Upon further reflection, it’s not that surprising. As marketers, we’ve never been under so much pressure to deliver results right freaking now. And to do it cheaper. As humans we’re genetically hardwired to be biased towards the new. So much so that we often discard the tried and true for the novel and unproven – even when the evidence shows the old stuff is vastly superior. And so it goes with marketing. Shiny new marketing tactics, technologies and theories become all the rage through articles and conference presentations with the flimsiest of proof of how they worked for one company but without a shred of evidence why they will work others – much less all. I’ve compiled the following list of 12 popular tactics and supplied the latest evidence on why they don’t work as well as claimed and what you should consider doing instead.

Influencer Marketing

Back when advertising was a bit more ethical, this used to be called paid endorsements. And every ad using this tactic came with huge disclaimer “Paid endorsement”. Today, with often no disclaimers whatsoever, celebrities, experts and regular people with a “following” are getting paid to hawk all kinds of products and services. Even without the disclaimer, consumers aren’t fooled. An online survey highlighted by The Drum found that only “4% of consumers trust what influencers say.” The irony is stunning when you consider most companies hire influencers to give their products and services an air of authenticity they believe advertising cannot provide. But wait there’s more. Ethical and credibility issues aside, the business of influencer marketing also has a big, fat fraud problem. A recent study by Professor Roberto Cavazos of the University of Baltimore found influencers are defrauding companies of $1.3 billion annually through fake followers. Cavazos believes 50% of engagement on sponsored content is fake. Anyone can buy “followers” to inflate their “influence”. For $450 Buy-Instagram.com will deliver 50,000 followers and 50,000 likes – all “100% Instagram safe.” As Greg Satell said in the Harvard Business Review , “while the idea of influentials may be intuitively convincing, there is very little, if any, evidence that they actually can improve performance.”

Do This Instead:

Hire an agency or brand researcher to find out what your ideal consumers/customers really want and need from your company, product and/or service. Hire a brand strategist to turn these insights into an overarching positioning for your company that distinguishes you from your rivals, promises what potential buyers actually want and profitable and doable. Hire a media planner to determine the best ways to maximize reach to real potential buyers and a creative team to execute impossible to ignore and hard to forget communications that will connect with them. Or simply hire a full-service agency like Immortology to do all the above.

Discounting /Sales

Avoid discounts and sales like the plague. The only time discounts and sales are effective is when they attract a substantial number of new buyers that would not have tried your product/service without a discount. Otherwise they’re poisonous to profits. That’s why premium brands like Louis Vuitton, Apple, Whole Foods, Tiffany and Tesla never have sales. Discounts erode profits by giving deals to customers who would have gladly paid full price. Annual and seasonal sales simply train people when to buy. And every single time you offer discounts, you’re sending a loud and clear message your brand is not worth the full retail price you want to charge. What’s more, once you start discounting it’s painful to stop. Your customers will start demanding discounts and sales will crater as buyers wait for your next sell. here’s a massive difference between effectiveness and efficiency. And just as direct mail, sales activations and price promotions are well-proven tactics for generating quick sales and immediate volume growth

Do This Instead:

Offer discounts and freebies not directly related to your product/service. Like free shipping, expedited shipping or including an inexpensive accessory, a discontinued product or branded tchotchke taking up space in your warehouse. Invest in your brand. Reach more people with highly creative and engaging brand communications that memorably demonstrate the value of your product/service. Distinguish your brand from others by investing in packaging copy, design and materials that will make unboxing yourproducts a delightful experience.

Personalized Ads

For starters, personalization is bad because it’s unethical. The belief that consumers crave more personalized advertising experiences is ca-ca. Personalization can’t happen without personal data. And people definitely do not believe sharing their private data to get a more relevant and personal advertising experience is worth the trade-off. In fact, a Pew research study found that 75% of consumers are NOT ok with collecting user info to personalize search. This is one of the main reasonswhy over 30% of internet users have them.

In the same study 68% of people viewed targeted ads negatively. And other studies have shown that negative ad experiences correlate to negative brand perceptions and reduced purchases. Read about the Pew study here. Secondly, the data needed to personalize ads at scale would need to come from third parties. The dirty little secret of third-party data is that it is extremely inaccurate. According to Forrester, Only 12% of marketers have confidence in their data. In a Deloitte study where consumers were asked to validate third-party data on themselves, only 29% found their data to be 50% accurate or better. Think about that. “Personal” data was incorrect for 70% of consumers. Don’t believe it? Check out your own personal data: https://bluekai.com/registry/ • https://aboutthedata.com/

Inaccurate data leading to low ROI, is why Gartner predicts 80% of marketers who have in invested in personalization will abandon their efforts by 2025. Thirdly, personalization from brands is creepy. Despite all the hype about brands having personal relationships with people, research shows the vast majority don’t. Most people are so busy they struggle to have real personal relationships with people – much less brands. What’s more, there’s growing evidence that ads work better when people know millions of others are seeing exactly the same ad. So much for personalization. When it comes down to it, only one thing is abundantly clear. The only people who really think collecting user data to create personalized advertising are Martech companies.

Do This Instead

Hire a sales person. Nothing’s better at fostering a real relationship than a real person meeting with your customers one-to-one.

Hyper-Targeting

Despite what you’ve heard, niche targeting can actually stunt brand growth. Decades of research across countless studies have unequivically proven that reach - not niche targeting - is the biggest predictor of advertising success. Here’s why. By targeting only those who have purchased your brand and/or shown an interest in purchasing a product or service like yours, you are missing out on reaching the biggest source of company growth – new and infrequent purchasers. Translation – people who are barely or not aware of your brand at all. For most companies, 50% of growth comes from new and infrequent purchasers. This disproves Pareto’s law which states 80% of sales come from 20% of customers. In How Brands Grow , Byron Sharp presents data that unequivocally shows growth is directly correlated with increasing the reach of your advertising and penetration of your product. In other words, the best way to make your brand successful is to make it famous. And advertising that targets a broad audience is the most reliable way (not the cheapest) to achieve fame. So, if you want to have a successful brand, making your brand famous as possible should be the main goal of your advertising.

Do This Instead:

To maximize growth, you should concentrate your marketing efforts on new customer acquisition – not current customer retention. To accomplish this, your advertising should reach everyone in your market your budget will allow. Every marketing tactic and every media placement should be analyzed and justified by its actual reach. Every division ad should reach as many customers and end-users as possible. Every brand ad should reach as many potential buyers as possible across all consumer and professional divisions. To maximize success, your brand doesn’t have to be famous with everyone – just everyone in your particular market.

Short Headlines, Copy and Videos

There is no correlation between the length of a brand video, ad headline and/or ad copy and effectiveness. The most effective headlines, body copy and videos are ones that people find interesting. People will read or watch anything – even advertising – as long as they find it worthy of their time. Length has nothing to do with it.

Do This Instead:

Of course, some platforms have rigid headline, copy and video length requirements. Beyond those constraints, judge ads by how interesting they are to your audience – not how long they are.

Rational, Logical Advertising

Oh boy. I find those who are not so hot at coming up with highly imaginative ads tend to downplay the importance of creativity. Here are the facts:

• 75% of ad effectiveness derives from creative quality. Creative ads are more likely to get noticed, shared and remembered. Which means they do more with less media spend.

• In fact comScore found that creativity is 4x more important than media plan quality in driving sales.

• Next to a brand’s market size, ad creativity generates the second highest impact on profitability

• Creative ad campaigns produce up to 11x more market share growth than average ones

Do This Instead:

Only hire agencies or individuals with outstanding creative portfolios. The more great work they’ve done, the more likely they’ll do the same for you. Before hiring an agency make sure the people who created the work you like most are available to work on your account. Case and point, an agency that will go unnamed still features my work on their website and in their presentations even though I left over a decade ago.

Targeting Younger Instead Of Older Consumers

Advertising has always skewed disproportionately towards the young. There are many reasons for this including:

• Those who work in advertising are younger than the general population

• The desire of brands to appear modern and cool

• A misguided belief that younger generations have more disposable income than they do

• Targeting and showing young is the advertising norm

Problem is, Millennials and Gen Y are not responding to ads. A recent Wall Street Journal article explained why. They’re broke. Read more about America’s poorest generation in Adweek’s “Why Targeting Millennial Consumers Might Not Be Such a Hot Idea After All” What’s more it’s been proven over and over again there really isn’t much difference between generations. The belief that Boomers, GenXers and Millennials are these monolithic, separate groups who respond in radically different way to advertising is simply not true. For most products and services, older people are just as likely to buy as younger people. Here’s a few more reasons you should consider including older people in your marketing.*

• If Americans over 50 were their own country, they'd be the third largest economy in the world - larger than the entire economies of Germany, Japan, or India

• They possess 70% of all the wealth in the country

• They are responsible for about half of all consumer spending

• They buy 62% of all new cars

• Despite the fact that many are retired, they still have 55% higher annual income than some other adult demo groups

• And on average they have a net worth about 3 times that of the rest of the people

• They dominate 94% of CPG categories

• They are the Internet’s largest demographic constituency

• They are much easier and much cheaper to reach than any other demographic group

• Between now and 2030 they will grow at almost 3 times the rate of adults under 50.

Yet, according to a 2016 report by Nielsen, less than 5% of advertising is targeted to them.

*The above list of facts was shamelessly lifted from Bob Hoffman’s blog The Ad Contrarian. Check it out here .

Do This Instead:

Include psychographics (lifestyle, wants, needs) instead of just demographics (income, geography, age, gender) to your messaging strategy and media plans.

Online (Digital) Marketing Bias

The minute you become responsible for selling a brand or product, you lose your objectivity. And no matter how unbiased you think you are, you’re not. Trust me, it happens to the best of us. It’s why surgeons are not allowed to operate on their family members. It’s too personal. And when things get too personal in marketing mistakes like Pepsi’s inadvertent social justice parody with Kendall Jenner happen. The biggest flop for Pepsi since the disastrous “Refresh Everything” campaign.

As marketers, most of us live and work in a pretty tight little bubble. It is an echo chamber where dissenting voices of reason are often drowned out by a loud and biased chorus of sheeple. Case and point, the most in-depth study ever on the value of different media for advertising by Ebiquity called Re- evaluating Media . They found troubling proof that advertising pros have a personal bias towards the effectiveness of online media that simply doesn’t stand up to the evidence. They compared 10 different types of media to determine which ones were most effective based on the following 12 attributes:

• Targets the right people at the right time

• Increases campaign ROI

• Triggers a positive emotional response

• Increases brand salience

• Maximizes campaign reach

• Gets your ads noticed

• Low cost audience delivery

• Builds campaign frequency

• Guarantees a safe environment

• Short-term sales response

• Transparent third party audience measure

• Low production costs

They then asked marketers to rank each of those media channels on the 12 attributes above. The results show a striking disconnect between what marketers perceive to be most effective media versus reality. The truth? Social media, online video and online display are way less effective than marketers perceive them to be. See the full report here.

A study of 2,400 respondents showed the eight least trusted media channels are all online. The top trusted ones are all traditional offline, mass media channels.

Do This Instead:

Hire an experienced brand researcher to conduct qualitative and quantitative studies to find out who your market actually is, what moves them and why and how they consume media and where best to reach them. Knowing who your market actually is and understanding them from an unbiased, evidence- base point of view is called market orientation. Mark Ritson has written an in-depth article on this subject called “The First Rule Of Marketing Is You Are Not The Customer” that’s much more enlightening than my feeble crack at it here.

Over-Investing In Online Advertising

Offline (traditional) advertising is best at generating demand. Online (digital) is best at fulfilling it. You need both to maximize growth. This is as close as we’ve ever gotten to a Unified Theory of Advertising. According to the Advertising Research Foundation , the optimal media mix for maximizing advertising effectiveness for most businesses is 78% traditional and 22% online. For those who still believe younger consumers are way different than older ones, the ratio for targeting Millennials is only slightly different with 71% traditional and 29% online.

In Effectiveness In Context, Les Binet and Peter Field present evidence that all brands need brand building and sales activation to maximize growth. Most companies should invest a minimum of 60% of their ad budgets into long-term, mass market, brand building campaigns and no more than 40% into direct, short-term sales activation tactics. However, the average business puts 72% of its advertising in online media – almost the direct opposite of what they should be doing. For companies that sell directly to customers/consumers through their own or third-party e-commerce sites, the above ratios should be even more skewed towards offline, mass media like TV, radio, outdoor, print, etc.

Still skeptical? Consider this. With all the targeting capability and data you can imagine, Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple not only spend heavily on traditional channels, they are all increasing their investments in long-term brand advertising because an over-investment in short-term, online marketing can lead to diminishing returns and sales declines. Here’s an NBC article on why other big brands are shifting from short-term online advertising to long-term, mass market brand building advertising.

Do This Instead:

Find out where your sales and growth are actually coming from. The big problem with digital advertising is that it’s mainly used to target people who were going to buy your product or service anyway. The term for this is called “the selection effect”. Their desire to buy may have come from a brand exposure that happened offline – in a store, through a friend, via a traditional ad on TV, radio, print or a billboard. Attribution models that use last clicks, views, likes, shares and downloads are skewed towards online ad tactics and do not give credit to other and more powerful things that motivate people to buy. Truth is, attribution models that rely on metrics like the above cannot and will not ensure effectiveness.

The only reliable way to know where sales are actually coming from is to test. Cut off some of your short-term tactics and see if there’s an effect on sales. Invest in long-term brand and fame building tactics for a year and see if sales and revenue have grown.

Watch this candid and enlightening video of adidas’ Simon Peel candidly explaining how they over-invested in online advertising tactics.

Ads That Run Less Than Six Months

Research by Les Binet and Peter Field in Media In Focus – Marketing Effectiveness In The Digital Era prove short-term ad campaigns will leave you short-changed. Campaigns that run for atleast six months generate much higher growth than those that run for less than six months. And if you stop advertising, Mediacom concludes that brand consideration will begin to drop at a rate of 15% per week and will revert to pre-campaign levels after only four months. Again, it’s not an either or thing.

While investing in long-term campaigns will yield more growth and profits than short-term ones, you need both to maximize returns. In addition to having both long and short-term executions, the most successful campaigns are also integrated in look and feel and unified by a highly creative idea.

Do This Instead:

To maximize success, part of your ad campaign should consist of short-term (ads running less than 6 months) performance advertising. However, as a general rule it should be no more than 40% of your budget if you’re B2C and 50% if you’re B2B. The rest should be invested in mass reach, long-term, fame building advertising.

Advertising On Just One Or Two Media Channels

Most companies only run their ads on one or two channels. This is a missed opportunity. Research shows that adding additional media channels to your marketing mix boosts performance. In fact, each additional channel added increases effectiveness – for up to 5 different channels in total. Seeing a brand advertised on different media triggers long-term memorability.

Do This Instead:

Run your advertising message on five different media channels. Five channel campaigns are ideal and are 35% more effective than one channel campaigns.

Multiple Brand Messages

Multiple ads with different messages executed inconsistently with inconsistent brand imagery are bad business. In fact, ads for the same brand with varied creative strategies and inconsistent brand design can actually cancel each other out – making the ads and brand less memorable. On the other hand, having a big idea with a consistent brand message, look and tonality integrated across multiple media channels can increase ROI by 57% .

Do This Instead:

Create an Overarching Brand Strategy. Make sure all your tactical initiatives support the Overarching Brand Strategy consistent but surprising messaging and distinctive brand graphics, design and language. When people see your advertising they should know right away it’s an ad from you even if they’re too far away to read it.

Brainstorming Creative Ideas

A meta-analytic review of 800 teams cited in by the Harvard Business Review found that individuals – not teams – “are more likely to generate a higher number of original ideas when they don’t interact with others.” But that’s just the tip of the iceberg why brainstorming creative ideas is not such a great idea. The bigger issue is this. Despite a belief that great ideas can come from anyone because everyone’s creative. Nothing could be further from the truth. While everyone may have the capacity to come up with a great ad or campaign idea, the reality is creative professionals will come up with much more and much better ideas. That’s what creative pros are trained to do. It’s what they do every single day. And over the course of a career they may have solved thousands of creative challenges. Thinking you and your team can just jump in and solve it better is at best naïve and at worst, just plain arrogant.

Do This Instead:

Hire a creative pro and let them do their job so you can concentrate fully on doing yours.

Other Articles You May Find Interesting:

THE GREATEST COMEBACK IN ADVERTISING HISTORY IS NIGH

THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY IN MARKETING SINCE AL GORE INVENTED THE INTERNET.

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