Paid Attention by Faris Yakob gives us an insight into the origins of advertising and how it is changing with the development of technology. Nowadays, consumers are surrounded by advertisements and different commercial content, which make them more reluctant to pay attention to them. Therefore, the main goal of today’s advertising is to capture the consumer’s attention, which is the most valuable resource. Faris Yakob states than it is becoming more difficult every time to complete that task since commercial content is constantly bombarding consumers and as a result, they choose to skip that content if they have the option.
He claims that the problem with traditional advertising models is that they focus on the transmission of messages to consumers. That’s the main reason why they no longer work. Consumers’ minds and their perception of advertising have changed within the years, as well as their reaction to brand content. The main message that Faris Yakob wants to give us with his book is that attention is now the most important resource and marketers should adjust to this change in order to create successful advertising.
This book provides a guide on how to face those changes and become more efficient in the modern advertising industry. He discusses three main points that can be applied to an Integrated Marketing Campaign and they will help marketers make it better.
1. Connect with your customers personally and make them happy
As it was said at the beginning of this blog post, it is becoming harder to catch the attention of the consumers since they are constantly seeing promotional content that they did not ask for. If you want to connect with your customers, you need to create an interaction with them, not only providing them with information about a certain product or service but also showing them that it is worthy and it is going to benefit them somehow.
Faris Yakob makes clear that smaller actions that make real people happy in the real world can also be very effective at generating attention. He provided us with the example of Coca-Cola. The company wanted to give its customers something that would spread a bit of happiness and something that we would be able to share with their friends. To do so, they installed a vending machine on a college campus which would give the students surprise gifts every time they got a coke. Check the video below to see their reaction to this act of happiness:
With this campaign, the company not only made consumers happy but also their innovative idea was shared between the community. As the author of the book said, we must remember that consumers have better things to do than engage with brands, unless we give them a good reason to do so.
2. Use emotion to reach consumers
In today’s media world consumers have too many choices to pay attention to and even if they try to be rational, they tend to pick a brand to which they are emotionally connected. Therefore, emotions play an important role in the selection process.
Faris denominate them the “lubricants of reason” because we can’t think without them. This takes us to the conclusion that consumers are seeking emotional communion and emotion in general leads to transmission. Consequently, the brand content will be better shared by consumers if it requires mental accommodation, forcing them to view the world in a different way.
3. Offer value in exchange for consumer’s attention
In the first point, we talked about the importance of connecting with your consumers to understand their needs and problems, and maintaining good communication is the way to do so. Traditional approaches will give the consumer a few options to choose from and they will focus on the transmission of their marketing messages. However, we mentioned earlier in the second point, that our decision-making process is driven by emotion. This means that we cannot give consumers just marketing messages and let them decide about a product. If they are going to give up value in the form of time and cognition (attention), then we must give them something too. Otherwise, there would be an unbalanced value exchange.
In conclusion, communication in the connected age needs to deliver value as well as messaging. This balances out the value exchange, making the communicative interaction equitable. Since it is delivering value, consumers will not avoid it and it will engender empathy for the brand, not resentment.
Many brands have already begun to deliver value to their consumers and a great example of this is Red Bull. The company created several long-running platforms to foster and celebrate the creativity of others. One of them is the Art of Can exhibition, which is an art contest that has run every year for a decade. It asks people to create works of art using the Red Bull can as the medium. The winning entries are displayed at exhibitions all over the world and online.
Top takeaway from Paid Attention
In today’s media, authenticity and good content are crucial to the success of a brand. Regarding how hard it is for a brand to get the attention of consumers it is necessary that the marketing content they are offering is authentic and stands out among the rest of the options. The two examples I provided before, the Coca-Cola vending machine experience and the Red Bull Art of Can Exhibition, they are both authentic, creative, and value giving. That’s why the advertising of these brands is very successful.
Another example that Faris Yakob mentioned in his book and that I found really interesting was Sony’s spot “Balls” announcing their Bravia TV. This was a small creative renaissance in their communication, which made Bravia the world’s bestselling TV and it pushed the company back to profit. Check the commercial below:
As you can see, during the whole commercial there are thousands of balls bouncing gently, in slow motion to an acoustic guitar cover. Researchers had previously found that:
“Televisions advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movements of the viewer’s heads.”
This has to do with the way our eyes track motion and for unknown reasons, our attention is more directed by curved emotion than rectilinear emotion.
In my opinion, this is a great example of thinking outside the box and being authentic, which was the main takeaway from the book.
After reading this blog post about innovative advertising for a digital world, do you think you have the necessary tools to create successful advertising?
REFERENCES
- Yakob, F. (2015). Paid Attention: Innovative advertising for a digital world. London, UK: Kogan Page Publishers.
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