Imagine a land where marketers wandered around town centres armed with frying pans embossed with brand names, which they used to smash people in the face going about their business.
Not surprisingly, the denizens of this imaginary land went and bought motorcycle helmets. Immediately the marketers launched a campaign to have the helmet shop closed down.
Welcome to the world of adblocking. As consumers we are exposed to a lot of truly awful mobile ads. They’re invasive, irrelevant and detract from a good user experience, hence why people install them. But, the cry goes up, it’s advertising that pays for much of the lovely content that people consume.
That’s true, but think about this: if great content and good ads were all that we were exposed to, no one would ever need or want an adblocker.
One of the biggest drivers of this adblocker adoption behaviour is the marketing sector’s obsession with quantity and measurability combined with our neglect of the quality of experience that we wish our audience to have. After all, there are few things in the world that you can annoy people into buying, except maybe an ad blocker.
Using hyper-rationalised approaches to marketing is enticing. As agencies we have what we feel is predictability and control, which becomes self-reinforcing and comforting. We can base our actions on what the numbers say and, when things don’t go as expected, we can explain that with numbers too.
There’s a self-referential certainty to it all. It’s all under our control and we get real-time feedback so that each little achievement releases a bit of dopamine in our brain. That makes us feel very good, for a short time – so we go back for more.
Sound familiar? It should; it’s the basis for addiction.
This is not to say that measurability and scale aren’t good things, because they are. In the right proportion and as part of a holistic view of what’s going on with our campaigns, they are incredibly powerful.
One of the simplest things we can try is the use of empathy: how do we really think people are feeling about their overall experience of a particular campaign or brand?
Things go wrong when scale and measurability are overly relied upon or used in isolation.
Michel Dubery is chief executive at wethepeople
This advertisement feature is paid for by the Marketing Agencies Association, which supports the Guardian Media & Tech Network’s Agencies hub.
