How often do viewers of your TV stations or listeners of your radio stations unintentionally watch, or hear, a commercial? Silly question, right? A similar question is being asked about digital ads by a highly influential newsletter — and it gives more ammunition to the TVB and RAB to go out there and fight for dollars that are rightfully theirs.
RBR+TVBR Editor-in-Chief Adam R Jacobson has more on this attention-getting subject, thanks to an e-mail received this morning (11/28) from eMarketer.
Here’s a headline in the overstuffed RBR.com e-mail inbox that immediately caught our attention on Tuesday morning:
How Often Do Consumers Intentionally Click Mobile Ads?
This would probably result in most readers answering, “Not many times.”
But, for a digitally savvy journalist who grew up with Z100 and KROQ and spent many hours doing homework in front of the TV watching reruns of What’s Happening? and MTV, it generated a whole other question:
How Often Do Consumers Intentionally Watch TV Commercials?
The very question is ridiculous, right?
Then, it got even more insipid:
How Often Do Consumers Intentionally Listen to Radio Spots?
Then, after a few giggles, the mood turned serious.
There are two sides to this yarn. First, there’s some serious problems with the whole “click on the banner” approach to marketer ROI. How many times have you been enjoying music on Spotify, or that “it’s so 2012” streaming service called Pandora, or perhaps your own radio station on TuneIn, when all of a sudden you hear “click on the banner …” and you start to grunt?
No one clicks on the banner. How can I if I’m out for a run, or driving and listening via Bluetooth, or writing this column and can’t break my train of thought?
Then, there’s the accidental click. We’ve all done it, because websites are sneaky — even on smartphones. You simply want to check one thing on a certain site. But, gosh darn it, that ad for Virgin West Indies Airways popped up, and now you’ve clicked on it and it has opened a web page for an amazing vacation getaway to Puerta Enchilada.
Digital marketing newsletter publisher and research firm eMarketer took on the question of intentional vs. accidental clicks, and here’s what they found: Most consumers say they rarely or never mean to click on ads served up on their phones.
Well, duh …
eMarketer looked at a survey of some 1,100 U.S. smartphone users between the ages of 18 and 73, because once you turn 74 AARP forces elder Americans to trade in their iPhone X for a rotary landline (although, we do admit those pink princess phones really do add to the living room).
The survey was conducted by Button and App Annie — mobile insights providers.
“The study found that for the most part, consumers aren’t too keen on mobile ads,” they found.
That’s about as much of a news headline as the one about Sen. Elizabeth Warren expressing her dislike of President Trump.
But, attention please, this is important stuff for broadcast media.
MILLENNIALS DON’T CLICK TO LEARN MORE
OK, now that you’re focused again because we said the magic “M” word, here’s more from Button and App Annie: “More than four in 10 millennials said they rarely click on a mobile ad, and another 17% said they never did.”
We bet they listen to a radio or TV station you might own, and may actually watch (and react) to a commercial they’ve heard or viewed.
Wow, that’s a stunningly awful graphic.
Yet, advertisers continue to pour money into digital — and the “click on the ad” mobile pitch works as well as a segue from Gerardo’s “Rico Suave” into Alice Cooper’s “Poison” on that Jacques FM running in your market.
Oh, but let’s not forget about our friends in broadcast TV. They have much to gain from this insight, too.
Just 31% of millennials said they sometimes click on a mobile ad, while 10% did so intentionally. The results were worse among older smartphone users.
So, what did we learn? Radio and TV consumers don’t “unintentionally” listen to or view commercials. Therefore, my old boss Erica Farber and Edinboro State University’s most famous adjunct professor, Perry Sook, need to draft some clever pieces for sales execs and broadcast industry leaders to pitch to CMOs, media buyers and media planners across the U.S.
How many radio listeners unintentionally heard your ad today?
How many TV viewers unintentionally saw your spot today?
Now, here’s the flip side of our tale.
With over-the-top (OTT) viewing of TV commercials exploding at a rate that is rapidly transforming the entire distribution of scripted programming, the :30 and :60 are becoming as trendy as an Adrienne Vittadini oversized wool sweater with chain link motif.
That’s not a problem of consumers not wanting to see the commercials. Rather, it’s an ad agency and CMO problem that TV stations have to deal with, because they have no say over what crap airs between the programming you control. Have you seen any :30 or :60 airing on TV in any nation other than the U.S. or Canada in the last year? They’re pretty darn good. Our commercials suck — and TV is stuck with them. The Band-Aid is to introduce :06 spots for our short attention spans. That’s BS — creativity has sunk to a new low and Madison Avenue forgot how to sell something. Honestly, the only good TV commercials in the U.S. are in Spanish, because Hispanic marketing and advertising shops have some creativity injected into their veins courtesy of Latin America, not the bozos in New York who don’t watch TV or radio like the people watching the commercials they create.
Meanwhile, how long is that stopset on any given radio station in your market? Is your best automotive client still using a 30-year-old music bed and shouting out deals? Are some of your commercials just annoying? Is “Jaime,” the No. 1 Number Two Guy at Progressive, leading listeners to punch out and select something other than what’s spewing out of your station?
Yeah, a lot of radio commercials suck. Go to Great Britain and listen to what they’re doing. Flights to Heathrow are cheap. Or, use a Leeds postal code when trying to access a Global-owned station’s audio stream from the States.
So, class — what did we learn?
Mobile digital ads are worthless. Radio and TV ads have the power to bring greater ROI.
We just have to fix the creative, and that’s oftentimes out of our control.
Let’s hit the ground running today, with help from the TVB and RAB, and show America that broadcast media still moves sales as we already look forward to a pivotal 2018 — a year where radio reemerges as a powerful advertising tool and broadcast media settles down from the digital disruption that has erroneously led CMOs to believe that tried and true media doesn’t deliver anymore.
Our leaders have simply been unable to delete the lie.
Adam R Jacobson is the Editor-in-Chief of the Radio + Television Business Report. He’s also an avid runner, and it is his belief that the radio and television industries have a solid future — so long as they understand that the digital and social media businesses have pushed them into a long, sweaty, exhausting marathon that takes discipline, and some training. That training is getting each and every broadcast media executive and employee to understand its positives, its ROI abilities, and how to put that in the hands of marketing decision makers. “A Facebook like is not a cash register receipt,” he says.
