Crappy Digital Marketing – Part 1

• Author: Matthew Jackson
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If you’d like to find a saying that doesn’t apply to online activities, you’ll be hard pressed to find one better than, “If you build it, they will come.” Surfing the net is an elective process, there are thousands of people offering services and sites that are very similar to your own. So if you decide to aggravate your users, there’s a fairly good chance that they’ll fire up their search engines and find somewhere else to get their kicks.

We’ve know that people don’t really like advertising. They’ll engage with it if it’s clever, or has some sort of relevance to their lives but they’ll do everything they can to evade it if it’s crappy or irritating. Television, as a medium, has delivered tons of advertising effluence to the masses with great success. This has been achieved for the simple reason that TV viewers, until recently, were captive. There are only so many bathroom breaks you can take before it takes less effort to sit through a commercial than to do something else.

That’s not how the internet works; it often takes less effort to find something of equal interest in less time than it would take to engage with a lame product pitch or some wretched, gimmicky advertising. With this in mind, it amazes me that digital companies are still deploying digital marketing drivel that pisses their users off.

I’m someone who spends a of a lot of time online, it’s part of my job and I have made this new-fangled technology part of my life too. It’s where I do my research, where I find a large portion of my entertainment and where I settle those fatuous little arguments over names, dates, artists and recipes. As a result, I’ve built up a list of digital advertising and strategies that really grate my carrot. If they’re getting to me, they’re getting to your users too. So, read on.

Page takeovers

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve come across some pretty awesome page takeovers recently, they’re the ones that have a cool little visual or a clever piece of copy which encourages me to click on it before storming onto my screen. The page takeovers that suck are the ones that behave like your least favourite neighbours. They invite themselves over, spoil the conversation, drink your beer and only disappear when you figure out how to kick them out.
Page takeovers that load on land are rude, they’re invasive and they ‘re not helping anyone’s cause. Why? Well, they’re getting in the way of what I came to the page for in the first place. It helps if you think of online marketing as a relationship. If you’d like to get me into bed you’re going to have to buy me dinner, dazzle me with your wit and charm, and invite me up for coffee when we get to yours. If you whip off your clothes within two seconds of meeting me, I’m going to spray you with pepper spray. It’s what you deserve.

Autoplay

This doesn’t only apply to video, it applies to audio too. I don’t want to listen to what you think is great music for a site. In most instances it’s poison to my ears, and besides I’ve got my own music playing most of the time anyway.

Auto playing music can have some terrible consequences too. One evening I was casually browsing the net when some horrid voice started blaring over the speakers, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Unfortunately, my ex-girlfriend, sitting next to me at the time, got the fright of her life and logically started beating seven shades of brown out of me. She thought I had played horrific voice intentionally. It’s not often that online brands result in me getting the smack down. Aside from navigating away from the page with alacrity, I will never, ever purchase anything from a company that gets me beaten up.

In South Africa there’s another really good reason not to autoplay; bandwidth is expensive and auto playing music and videos eat bandwidth like crocodiles do wildebeest. Essentially online marketers are stealing a precious resource from their users.

Instead of treating users like Jennifer Lovelace and forcing substandard twaddle down their throats, online marketers would get better results if they hired some great creatives and developed campaigns which their users would actually like to engage with. Again, develop something interesting and you won’t need to whore your products to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

FaceCrap

Social media is not a buzzword anymore; there are people out the spending more time than your average working day glued to the likes of Facebook and Twitter.  Now, social media is exactly what it says on the box. It’s a digital medium which facilitates social interaction. So here’s something which might come as news to some marketers; a social interaction is not an interaction between a company and a person, it’s the interaction which happens between people.

Even though Facebook has managed to get some really awesome data mining built in, which will allow you to deliver targeted adverts to your users, no one gives a shit. People aren’t really interested in liking your company or supporting your cause, unless there’s something in it for them.  They’re definitely not interested in your little side bar advert. Think about it, when was the last time you clicked on an advert in Facebook?

While company groups and sidebar ads are lame, they’re not awful. They don’t really upset users unless they’ve got a marketer friend who keeps spamming them. Game adverts and apps which post to walls, or apps which use misleading titles or to draw users in, on the other hand, are the bane of countless users.

Facebook has wised up to the fact that its users hate horrible adverts. The company has given users the ability to banish bad advertising in as little as two clicks. They’ve done the right thing. They’ve realised that awful advertising will eventually turn people of the service so they’ve given them the choice to get rid of the stuff they don’t like. As a social media strategy it’s great, but you’ve got to ask yourself this: If users have the ability to get rid of my advert in two clicks and I’m paying for impressions, how valuable is this service to me?

So, what’s the solution? How do you get your users to engage with your advert instead of banishing it to the wild? The answer is simple. It’s the same solution for every advertising medium: Don’t suck! Create adverts which are awesome, which get peoples’ attention, which make them want to engage with your brand. How do you get this right? We’ll why not try hiring a decent creative agency, or get some talented free lancers on board to make sure that your campaign is actually engaging and not something that your wife thinks is a good idea. No offence to your wife, but her opinion only counts in this situation if she’s an awesome creative marketer.

So there you have it; that wraps up our first installment of the crappy digital marketing series. Stay tuned;  next week we’ll covering some truly dreadful strategies.