“In a world where no one experiences a commercial they don’t want to, do you really expect people to listen to what you tell them and be sold to every third minute?  You’re dreaming.”

I can’t admit that I’m not guilty of ad avoidance.  Working in advertising, I should probably feel a little guilty about that, but I don’t.  We are exposed to so many ads in a typical day (up to 625), can we really blame our audiences that try to avoid them?  Pain avoidance is human nature, and some advertising can be mighty painful.

With the increased amount of advertising that is thrown at us across an increasing number media channels, relevancy is everything to advertising success.  Ensuring that your ad is front of the right person at the right time should be much easier, given the increased amount of adjustable variables; audience information, flexibility over placement, channel, type, media format, and the additional functionality that new technology has given us.

Relevancy is large contributor to the success of any given advertising.  Being exposed to irrelevant ads can grate, but being bombarded with them day after day after day after day can really become an irritation.  For me, being aware of the targeting potential of some networks, it grates even more.  Advertisers throwing money on blanket ad campaigns with little to no targeting really gets my goat up.

When working with clients, I’ve always worked hard to ensure any advertising is as targeted as humanly possible.  Why should irrelevant consumers be exposed to ads that they have almost no chance to respond to? All this does is irritate the consumer and drive up advertising costs.  And, over time, this irritation builds up and turn into ad avoidance.  Working in a media where ads are being randomly thrown to people just seems like madness.

I can understand that ‘traditional’ media has major problems with targeting because of the way the media is delivered.  Sure, they can target by program type and time of day, but in general you’ll be exposed to a lot of crap ads you really don’t care about simply due to the fact it’s a one to many delivery channel.  Sky is a little better with across specific channels, but it’s still very generic.

I don’t however forgive ‘new’ media to the same degree.  Targeting is getting better with some services, but is still based on guesswork and still has miles to go.  With websites taking in a plethora of information about it’s users (age, interests, education, employment, ‘pages…’) there’s really no excuse why their delivered advertising should ever be as irrelevant as other channels.  Streaming music services are able to log everything you’ve ever listened to and how much.  They are able to know your exact music tastes down to a tee, so why am I being advertising Celine Dion albums when all I listen to is drum and bass?

I really like advertising, let’s just get it targeted, eh? Can you imagine only ever seeing ads relevant to your interests? How nice would life be where every piece of advertising you see is something personal to you, that you’d actually consider buying?