Present Advertising trends

Practice makes a man perfect. Whoever said this line was surely not aware of blunders that it can lead to. The reason is, practicing an erroneous task is not only going to achieve your targets faster but also quicker disregard from the general public. Displeasing Marketing advertisements in mid night are some of the examples of these blunders. But the big question is what makes companies practice this kind of weird stuff with their own ‘close to heart’ products? And what goes on in the minds of marketing division of these firms? Just look it biologically- dislikes are something with which human brain consumes a little more oxygen because extra care is taken in to avoid it, which ultimately means extra effort. Psychology has always served as a base layer for luring consumers and prospective customers. But it’s not only about consumers but it also holds something for the newspapers, television channels, websites, etc. Are products, whose ads are irritating, bought less frequently? The ultimate aim of an Ad is to somehow persuade a person and use all kinds of techniques to influence their behaviour and opinion. Theory of AIDA is still practiced by successful advertisers to attain the ultimate objectives of advertising objectives-to retain consumers for their product, to deliver value driven processes to the consumers and to increase the sales of the product. In the present scenario, the increasing number of never ending ads is making the user experience worse than ever. Marketers are under increasing pressure to create high-impact TV ads, but are they worth being annoying to be remembered? Switch to live telecast of any cricket match in India, majority of viewers will remember every ad at the end of match along with the score of their favourite team. The ads are specially scripted for these situations. The intermediate time period is characterised by short length and high viewership. Short time period makes sure that ads have to be precise. But the irony is that these ads are of sponsors. In India every company dreams of sponsoring cricket match. And with the tremendous increase in the number of television buyers and viewers, every company wants to cash on this media. And if a person wants, he can fully blame everything on cricket. Tiny break of 20-40 seconds when the bowling end of the pitch is changed or when a over ends, gives opportunity to broadcaster of showing commercial advertisements to viewers. Though the viewers are slowly getting used to such traits, but still there is a large portion of them wanting to switch off their television sets before the match gets over. Recently a media house commented over this issue and asked viewers whether they wanted to see sports uninterrupted and if they can pay an extra price to avail this

special facility. The people raised their voice on this issue and questioned him back. Now the big question to answer was –Aren’t people allowed to watch sport without any interruption? When people want to see happy faces of their favourite stars, channels recommend people to forget everything and drink a cola or try a new flavour of cornflakes, as if it was the only thing they wanted in this world. Positive opinion of the brand plays an important role in thisactivity. And it is also one of the reasons, why these companies can experiment with annoying ads. These ads ensure that they are repeated again and again, conditioning the consumer to buy that product. Short duration and annoying jingles make sure that they communicate only one side of the story.

It is also important to understand that the ad industry plays with various features of human mind like humour, emotions, energy, egoism, budget management, love, family, friends, trust and they make sure that they target only those viewers that can be manipulated. For instance, Indian people being considered more emotional, Banks focus on making emotional ads for credit loans. And at the same time they may be considered irrelevant or ineffective by some viewers. Advertisements also act as a psycho technology manipulating people. The advertisers perform highly funded market research into finding the weak spots in the thinking process and psyche to sell their products to the targeting customers. Repetition of ideas is so mechanical that we fall into their trap. For example, 20 years ago, there was an ad of a mango candy and scary enough to make a child cry. It had such an impact on me that I still remember the name of candy and I can say that the company was very successful in using those 20 seconds in the best possible manner. The purpose of this example was to show how memory can be used to control the purchasing decisions. The Second big question is – what do people value more – the analysis of ad or selection of the best product? The answer lies in the fact that when an ad ends, its nature of repetitiveness and ambiguity helps in making a decision in a fast paced life situations. According to a study, 16 characteristics were found to influence ad irritation. Poor casting, featuring disturbing characters, ads creating tension, poor execution and ad placement are the top causes of ad irritation. But the most common reason for ads being annoying is that they are significantly different from their viewers activities and actions like communication or difference in perception.

The presumptuous nature of annoying ads enables the companies to make the audience focus more on irrelevancy of the ad than on the product. This in turn reduces the evaluation of the brand as compared to those ads which people consider to be a part of their lives. An important factor to take into account is that there are very less people who want to dig down much into their memories only for product decision making, and so they end up purchasing what they can quickly remember. However, when consumers have to make a consumption choice, they don’t remember the annoying nature of ad. To know more about various categories of annoying advertisements, it is necessary to look into different advertising formats like banners, ads that look like website content, video ads and Pop-ups. Ads disguised as website content are mostly misleading, but compared to other formats pop-ups are the common advertising format in today’s world. Pop-ups are online ads that force themselves in front of users. Ad agencies make sure to relate our past activity with ads that we see by continuously monitoring our activities on the internet. For example, if we are searching for fare from A to B, a pop-up ad of a travel company promising you to get best discounts to travel from A to B can be expected in next few minutes. They actively engage the visitors, but most of the time they end up annoying them. If we were to plot a graph having time on x-axis and user anxiety on y-axis of any internet surfer, we should not be surprised to see spikes in between. These pop-ups interfere with our activity so much that most of the users are using pop-up blockers.

The effect of these ads has been such that we have reached a stage called “ad blindness”. This is a phenomenon in which users don’t notice ads and close them even before they show up. Whether it is text based ads or flashing banner ads, consumers have evolved themselves to ignore them. Nonetheless, it is quite evident that intrusiveness in advertising practices has been the chief reason for interrupting the goals of consumers. Though advertisers prefer ads that demand consumers’ attention, eventually they have formed negative attitudes toward such tactics. This has led to ad avoidance and declining rate of interaction between consumers and companies. Ads previously meant for providing information to the customer, are now acting as barriers in making purchasing decisions. But eventually, these are the Ads which consumers remember in the long-run.

---A work by Anupam,Dheeraj,Anuj,Hemant based on Internet research 

Privacy invasion and marketing- A cat and rat game

I must say, things are looking good once again. There is door bell in our house, and we make sure that it is only when it rings, that we open the door for someone to come in. There are alarm clocks to wake us up just in case we sleep too long. This all may sound like an ideal scenario to brag about our immaculate life. But, being an optimistic person, I pray daily to god if somehow they can lend us a little intelligence to create alarms and bells in the business world too. The reason being, some of us are busy playing action reaction game in which dollars and rupees play a role of ace or joker. To sum all these thoughts together, I was referring to intrusion, with money in the driver’s seat. We are continuously being analysed, reviewed, classified into groups and tested by companies and in some cases companies might know our likes and dislikes better than our parents.
Are they trying to become our parents? Not really, but it is sure that they want to act like one- Guiding and overruling our choices and decisions. For instance, if you are a regular visitor to a small shop, the owner will know you very well and will guide you like a one year old. And needless to say, everyone likes that kind of hospitality. Your favourite social networking site suggests you friends and coincidentally you might know them all. If you are worried to get best fares from Delhi to Mumbai, it’s just only matter of seconds that you will see a popup saying- get best fare from Delhi to Mumbai and temptation will make us click that Advertisement. Now the big question is – How important are ethics in case of marketing research? The way a company conducts its market research these days have serious ethical repercussions impacting the lives of consumers. And the ease with which companies can gather data about its customers, surely leaves us thinking about the level of privacy invasion. A market research assumes that people are honest and truthful about their choices. But there has to be a level of honesty to ensure that they don’t blow cover of their own privacy. In a recent survey on ethical and methodological practices across three times periods- 1975-76, 1989-90, and 1996-97, the results revealed an increase in deceptive procedures over time reported in human participant studies, from 43% in 1975-76 to 56% in 1996-97, largely due to an overall rise in the use of active deception procedures. So, it becomes necessary to find a perfect balance of honesty and privacy while sharing opinions and ideas.

Privacy and confidentiality are important factors for a business to protect their intellectual property and secret business traits. And in most of them they have been given the status of law. But why a single person fails to take advantage of the same? Best reason according to me is that, they don’t feel insecure while sharing their opinion and they really don’t understand what information they should share with the world. As it might happen that you

are sharing a post online that says –hey I am going to become a mother or father. We might not be even aware, but it’s quite likely that you will start seeing Ads related to childcare. Moreover if we were hesitant enough, coffee shops and restaurants would never had introduced feedback forms asking their email id and numbers, which according to me, are not a part of research and unnecessary. Though still there are some examples which contradict this notion about people. For instance, a Beijing university sued Microsoft for providing a formal contract which had to be accepted to install windows xp.
It is imperative for us to know that if companies are not aware about their customers, then instant offers and discounts will become a distant dream. Marketing division of a company will be useless if they give discounts on product A when they are dealing with customers who like product B. Nowadays we have so many platforms to express ourselves, share our opinions and tell what is right and wrong. This has made marketing products much easier. More Customers are now satisfied with the products they are dealing with. According to a survey from Lab42, among those who like brands on facebook, 82% say facebook is a good place to interact with brands. 75% say they feel more connected to brands. 69% say they have liked a brand because a friend has done so.

It is interesting to see that promotional discounts and coupons are still connected to liking a brand online especially when it’s used to drive sales. And companies are intelligent enough to follow different strategies on different platforms. For example, on LinkedIn there will be more Ads on products/services requiring individual decisions and which are mostly B2B oriented. The only thing which a company can be held accountable for is how much customers rely on their brand and what level of moral relationship is present between them. Companies promoting and motivating morality in its marketing tactics is surely going to earn some respect by the employees as well as customers. It is hard for me to come to a conclusion immediately. I can only suggest that market researchers have obligation to collect data which truly reflects the needs of customers. If he has a one dimensional view, probability of harm to customers increases. Other than that, companies which have lot of data to play with, it becomes mandatory for them to lay down strict laws and regulations to restrict any kind of data sharing and requiring the accent of customers protecting the customer’s right to privacy. A customer should be entitled to opt out of the sharing if he doesn’t want to get involved. People should be aware of what they share with outside world, for example it is quite obvious for a family to trigger robbery just because they have posted online that they are going to be on a holiday. It needs to be kept in mind that, everyone has become quite intelligent and resource and data utilization is no more a challenge for most of the humans. Deceptive marketing is there to stay and it is only by our intelligence and level of awareness that we can protect our privacy