how and why are ads so effective?
ads are increasing by an alarming amount and being stuffed literally eveywhere and in everything?!
and i dont know a single person that watches them or ever purchased anything because of them, not even the moest gullible people thet where scamed with all sorts of bullshit
In: 185
Companies aren’t dumb either. Ads increase sales; that’s why companies continue to pay for them.
As someone who works at McDonald’s I have to say otherwise. Any time someone comes in for just a fry I think they probably heard that radio ad that describes the fries lmao.
Not here. Generally record programs asking the adverts. Same on YouTube, when it gets to the advert I leave it. Don’t need to watch that shit.
As much as most people like to think they’re immune to advertising, almost everyone is influenced by it in some way or another. It’s a massive multi-billion dollar global industry, and companies invest in it because, especially in the age of digital advertising, it’s often easy to prove _exactly_ how effective it is.
Advertising is not just about seeing an ad and immediately purchasing that item. Good ad campaigns are designed to target a particular demographic and slowly influence their thinking, so that when it _does_ come time to make a purchase, a particular product or brand springs to mind first.
Take fast food, for example. You might see 50 ads for Pizza Hut over the course of a few months, but never consciously register them. But then one night, you and your buddies are sitting around and you’re all starving. When you’re discussing what to eat, what’s the first brand that pops into your head? Pizza Hut. Multiply that happening in multiple households every evening, and you’ve got yourself a very effective marketing campaign.
whatever you do, if you’re shopping mattresses browse in incognito mode. you’ll thank me later.
mattresses have huge markups and thus carpet bomb the internet with ads should you ever need to shop them.
Ads work best when you don’t know they are working.
Almost everyone says “don’t buy based on ads”. Almost everyone is wrong.
Quick. Think of a car insurance company.
I bet the one you thought is either 1) The one you already have or 2) The one that advertises the most in your area.
Ads keep the company name fresh in your mind. So that when you eventually go to need that service, you are likely to start with the freshest thought at top of mind.
You hate the add because it’s obtrusive. Most of the time tho, you couldn’t care less about who specifically paid to interrupt you, so it’s not like they harm the brand much; You’re mad at YouTube for introducing double adds, but you don’t really care who’s ads they are. At worst, you remember the brand as a thorn-in-the-side
But, if I’m hungry and don’t have time to cook, even if I don’t like the things McDonalds & BurgerKing stand for, my hunger is worth to me more than than what Ronald does with the $5 he takes for my chicken sandwich.
However, the only reason they get my money is because I know that they’re an option. The Thai mom-and-pop shop down the block? I can’t consider buying from them for the sole reason that I don’t know they exist. That’s the power of ads.
TLDR: Ads aren’t about you liking the brand, as much as they are getting word out. It’s better to annoy people so they know that you exist than it is to leave people alone and not to know about you
Ads are an indirect investment, you spend a certain amount on advertising hoping enough new customers will be attracted to make that money back and more. Bigger companies have entire marketing departments dedicated to trying to figure out how effective their advertisements are by analysing sales data compared to their ads and see if the timing of the ad campaigns correlate to an increase in sales, this is much easier with online ads as they can know if someone has visited their website by clicking through an ad.
Advertising has been a huge industry for more than a century but the internet provided new and unprecedented opportunities. For one it presented an entirely new space were ads could be placed and at the same time it was also a space to set up businesses. If you run an online business there’s no way someone can walk by your store and walk in, they have to come across it online and the only way for that to happen is with advertising, which makes it even more vital than it is with physical businesses which may be able to get away with passive advertising by their work or client base without them investing in advertising directly.
Nothing is really free. If a service is free, this means that you’re the product. The service makes money by showing you ads, or by gathering data which is then sold and used to create a consumer profile for targeted ads. The scale of it shows that despite having no direct effect on sales, it’s clearly working if companies are willing to spend more and more on ads. If they didn’t work, they wouldn’t bother sinking money into them.
For me, they only work for things I already like. I love me some Doritos but don’t eat them often as I typically avoid processed foods. If I see a Doritos ad, I’ll probably buy some in the next 2-3 days. I’ve never bought anything new because of an ad. If the product is new to me, it just doesn’t stick in my brain and I’ll never remember the ad by the time I go shopping.
Sometimes an ad just wants to show you that their product exists. You probably won’t go out and buy it right away, but once you know about it, it’ll pop up in your mind occasionally, prompted by other thoughts. It’s kinda like when you learn a new word, and suddenly you start seeing that word everywhere.
Also, when you know a product for a particular problem exists, you might start noticing you have that “problem” when before, you didn’t think it was a problem at all, or you worked around it, or you solved it in some less convenient way.
Usually people say “necessity is the mother of invention,” but advertising works on the reverse principle – invention is the mother of necessity.
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