Context and Choice

I’ve just been reading superfreakonomics, a great book by a journalist and an economist, and it got me thinking about display advertising and how we’ve literally become “bannerblind“. In the book, they tell us that the field of behavioural economics dictates that behaviour is a result of choice and context. A lot of the thinking of the behavioural economists railed against the logic of classic economists. This group of people tested various behavioural hypotheses through a series of lab experiments where they collected huge amounts of data to challenge the conventional wisdom.

For example, Altruistic behaviour could be seen in examples of a game developed by economists in the 1980s called Ultimatum, where people given a sum of money by the experimenter could give a lot, some or no money to a third party. Most folk often gave some of their money away. This made the experimenters think that everyone is intrinsically good-natured. However, in a slightly altered experiment, the reverse behaviour, Theft, was observed. What had changed? well for one, the set of options. Instead of just having the choice to give money, the option to take some of the other person’s money was introduced (which the majority took). But the context of both situations also influenced behaviour. In the both experiments, the test subjects were being watched by the experimenters and in the first case, when the limited options meant that the best outcome from a social perspective was to appear generous probably this probably went a long way in explaining at least in part some of the generosity. In the second experiment, where the thievery was more prevalent, whilst the context was the same, the introduction of a new choice reduced the social power of the observation by the experimenter and personal gain took over.

Context and choice – and creating the correct balance of this for each and every advert – is so incredibly important to advertising, and yet we often get it so wrong. In fact, we often leave this part of the creative process simply to the media buyers. I’m not sure I’ve seen many responses to creative briefs in my time that explicitly say what kinds of sites and in what context ads should run, but clearly they should as some of these poor placements clearly demonstrate.

Things like cookies sometimes help to overcome this, but even then, this doesn’t get it right in the best of cases. I was looking at furniture on the new made.com site recently and saw several items I quite liked. As I moved around the internet, I was presented with ads from made.com with a lot of the things I’d been looking at. At first I thought this was great, but after a few days of constantly being bombarded with these ads, it was almost enough to get me to clear out my cookies. It’s a bit like a chugger on the street or a pushy shop assistant who won’t leave you alone (for days).

So one thing I would say (and this is where full service agencies, or at least teams of collaborating creative/media agencies who work closely together should be excelling at) is that ensuring your ads are in the right place, at the right time should be the first thing you think about alongside the creative. If you’re not spending half your time thinking about this upfront, talking about it and agreeing the best inventory and placements to get, then you’re probably doing something wrong.

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Written by Robin Wong. Posted on October 7, 2010. Filed under Future gazing, banner advertising. Bookmark the Permalink. Post a Comment. Leave a Trackback URL.
Context and Choice

I’ve just been reading superfreakonomics, a great book by a journalist and an economist, and it got me thinking about display advertising and how we’ve literally become “bannerblind“. In the book, they tell us that the field of behavioural economics dictates that behaviour is a result of choice and context. A lot of the thinking of the behavioural economists railed against the logic of classic economists. This group of people tested various behavioural hypotheses through a series of lab experiments where they collected huge amounts of data to challenge the conventional wisdom.

For example, Altruistic behaviour could be seen in examples of a game developed by economists in the 1980s called Ultimatum, where people given a sum of money by the experimenter could give a lot, some or no money to a third party. Most folk often gave some of their money away. This made the experimenters think that everyone is intrinsically good-natured. However, in a slightly altered experiment, the reverse behaviour, Theft, was observed. What had changed? well for one, the set of options. Instead of just having the choice to give money, the option to take some of the other person’s money was introduced (which the majority took). But the context of both situations also influenced behaviour. In the both experiments, the test subjects were being watched by the experimenters and in the first case, when the limited options meant that the best outcome from a social perspective was to appear generous probably this probably went a long way in explaining at least in part some of the generosity. In the second experiment, where the thievery was more prevalent, whilst the context was the same, the introduction of a new choice reduced the social power of the observation by the experimenter and personal gain took over.

Context and choice – and creating the correct balance of this for each and every advert – is so incredibly important to advertising, and yet we often get it so wrong. In fact, we often leave this part of the creative process simply to the media buyers. I’m not sure I’ve seen many responses to creative briefs in my time that explicitly say what kinds of sites and in what context ads should run, but clearly they should as some of these poor placements clearly demonstrate.

Things like cookies sometimes help to overcome this, but even then, this doesn’t get it right in the best of cases. I was looking at furniture on the new made.com site recently and saw several items I quite liked. As I moved around the internet, I was presented with ads from made.com with a lot of the things I’d been looking at. At first I thought this was great, but after a few days of constantly being bombarded with these ads, it was almost enough to get me to clear out my cookies. It’s a bit like a chugger on the street or a pushy shop assistant who won’t leave you alone (for days).

So one thing I would say (and this is where full service agencies, or at least teams of collaborating creative/media agencies who work closely together should be excelling at) is that ensuring your ads are in the right place, at the right time should be the first thing you think about alongside the creative. If you’re not spending half your time thinking about this upfront, talking about it and agreeing the best inventory and placements to get, then you’re probably doing something wrong.

Compulsion

Once you have an ad in the right context, the user must feel compelled to overcome the learned behaviour of banner blindness to even look at the ad let alone interact with it. Again it comes back to choice. Most people who come to a web page do so to get some information that is more often than not, contained in the page they are looking at rather than the ad they see. If the choices on offer don’t fit into their mental search algorithm, then the visual cortex and human brain is particularly excellent at ignoring this information.

People have tried – and I believe failed – in many cases, to overcome this banner blindness. Industry interaction rates (somewhere around 0.0125% I believe) are a perfect example of how poorly ads are targeted and how uncompelling they are. Some have sought to introduce such delights as pre-roll ads (the ones where you go to look at some content and then are subjected to 15 seconds of ads, usually with little to no context for what you’re about to look at), or subtitle ads (like the ones on youtube that obscure a quarter of the video that you are forced to click to remove, an overwhelmingly negative experience for 99% of people). The web is abound with this gimmicky, intrusive ways of gettings eyes on creative ideas, and many of them will go the way of the pop-up (which I’m sad to say is still alive and well in some dark corners of the web).

But of course there are those that get it right, and how do they do that? Well quite simply, once you have people in the right place and at the right time, you communicate with them in the mode that they are best equipped to understand the information you are trying to present. Our brains are wired to take in information in a range of ways, but we all have a preference. Some people like words and numbers, some like sounds, some like pictures, and some want the emotional connection. You can hear it in the language people use.

“well what does that all add up to?”

“I see what you’re saying”

“I hear you”

“I really feel for you right now”

Whilst most people like a mixture of these things, everyone is drawn predominantly to one mode of taking in information. It seems obvious, and it’s a basic part of ideas like Neuro-Linguistic Programming, but it’s amazing how often we ignore this kind of evidence (or possibly actually don’t even know about it) and instead spend our client’s money on “doing something creative” for the sake of “doing something new” rather than thinking about the audience and making the creative easy to understand for the target audience. Ads could be so much more compelling if the medium made more sense to the individual in the context (but this is hard to predetermine as each individual is different).

Ads that speak to you say something new, or if they paint a picture, they draw your gaze, make you see things in a new light or look at something from a different perspective, or, they make you feel different. They have an impact. They make you curious, inspire a sense of fun, are slightly mischeivous, draw you to a greater cause than your own self, in fact any or all of these things. How many ads have you seen in your life that you can honestly say made you react in any of these ways? I can bet it’s not many.

If even just one of your ads in a campaign can be worked up in just one of these “modal” areas to appeal to a segment of the population, then you’ll be making a massive different to the success of your campaign.

Iteration and feedback loops

It’s time to get empirical.

How often do the people who engage in creating ad campaigns look at how the campaigns are working in order to understand the true success of the campaign? Who holds onto the data and analyses it to see what’s worked and what hasn’t? Who tracks down the most successful ads and the least successful and breaks it down?

Ad servers do to some degree. Media agencies do to some degree. Some clients might even get involved. Brand measuring companies occasionally get a look in. But Creative agencies? rarely if ever does information like this trickle down to the team who came up with the idea. And even more rare is the whole team of agencies getting together to look at the data, draw conclusions and refine and hone their ads to target the most receptive people.

The ad world has been slowly moving into an era when the campaign is always on, launches are simultaneous and global, presence is always required. The first world war-style statistical attrition school of advertising has been shown to be ineffective in its current state. The cold war mentality of launch and leave is dying out. The new era of technology evolving way beyond the grip of the established is forcing change every second, and what this means is that we need to work together with our partners to understand what’s working, drop what’s not doing it for us, and evolve the art of display ad. We need to set some targets as a group of collaborators, create a tangible measure, and actually hold what we do to be accountable against that target.

I’ll finish by quoting Albert Einstein who said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

Only by constantly testing what we’re doing are we avoiding what is basically low-level madness, and improving what we do in banner ads to make it more fun to create and show people, more relevant and interesting and more commercially successful for your clients. Let’s stop banner blindness, and teach people to see value in what display advertisers do.

About the Author:
Name: Robin Wong
Bio:

Location: London, UK
Company: Director @ Weir & Wong