Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Vanja Figenwald, Poslovni dnevnik
The digital era has revolutionized communication and radically changed the entire industry, but it has also brought some new problems that still beg for solutions. On one hand, it has opened up unimagined possibilities for the marketing industry in various forms and on many different platforms, but on the other hand, it has placed insurmountable doubts in front of experts for wooing mass public. Users, in fact, are very fond of free content, and will happily use it from pillar to post, but they don’t like to pay for it, or endure the ads that pay for it. And to ‘discipline’ them, or rather to ‘raise’ them for consuming content along with advertising, is a very demanding task.
Drama per charges
Delivering ads to consumers in general is a challenge in recent years. Among many there is a strong resistance to advertising. If you simply implement charging of content, in many cases you lose much of the regular users, so this kind of approach can afford only those who have a loyal following and premium content. If you try to finance content or service through advertising, you face the fury of the user offended by the forceful display of ads. The third option also failed to fully solve the problem: targeted advertising (according to consumer groups) and personalized advertising (to an individual), by which advertisers try to show users only those ads that might have a specific use-value for them. Even this has been met with resistance due to the delicate issue of privacy. The same people who spend entire days on social networks, publishing the most intimate details of their almost perfectly uninteresting lives ‘urbi et orbi’ suddenly become very sensitive to the issue of their non-existent privacy (which at that they considerably over-estimate) as soon as it comes to ad serving. The final blow in this continuous struggle of marketing with customers are adblockers, software add-ons to internet browsers that prevent displaying of most ads during the surfing. To say that this is a scourge that has spread over web browsers around the world would be an understatement, and, for very obvious reasons, it has become a serious (new) problem for the marketing industry.
Whether they want it or not, marketing specialists must constantly play with the cards they are dealt with, and seek for ways to jump over all these obstacles, somehow deliver the ad, and make effect with it.
Aggressive reaction
Unlike previous thoughtful attempts to circumvent the above problems, to this most recent slap in the form of adblockers content providers have reacted, perhaps for the first time in the internet era, very aggressively and without too much respect for the whim of their users – some, like Forbes, simply refuse to allow access to its pages to everyone who has such software enabled, until they switch it off. Others, like the Croatian portal net.hr, opted for a slightly softer approach, and instead of multimedia content (photos, videos) on their website publish a warning that ‘adblocker’ should be switched off (the text remains visible). However, such solutions seem rather temporary and, in all likelihood, will require a different, permanent solution.
“The only way to combat adblockers is quality. Nobody wants to block quality content. It’s only a matter of knowledge and skills to transfer the client’s message through such content. If the message is subtle, non-threatening, users will have nothing against it. Especially if they get additional value, or if the message of the content is relevant to the target group,” said Dario Drmač, director of digital technology from the agency Unex.
Although, he recalls, adblockers have been present for some time now, in Croatia they became a hot topic and challenge only recently. It is unknown how prevalent the use of such software is in Croatia, but it’s quite obvious that it has an upward trend. For now, the only real answer that marketing has to that is in the quality of content, Drmač highlighted, adding that “only if users see the benefit, gain added value in commercials, they will become accustomed to having to have advertising in order to have free content.” In his opinion, “as long as commercials are too invasive, users will have to fight against them, and advertising that made users stand against it ultimately failed to achieve its primary objective, to convey the client’s advertising message.”
Friendly personalization
One of the ways in which the industry is trying to fight with the resistance of users to the very mention of advertising is personalized advertising, a sort of sub-category of targeted advertising, though it also faces the wall of adblockers.
Simply put, targeted and personalized advertising uses large amounts of customer data to create individual ads for each user. For example, an e-commerce can – and indeed it does if it has any respect for itself – track shopping habits of users and predict what and when they buy, and respond accordingly with special discounts or promotions. Or, by following the purchases, or rather concrete products, it can be assumed which other products might be of interest to a particular user, and even when they might be desirable for them. This is one of the most banal examples.
Data processing capabilities today go much further and in advanced versions allow the creation of virtual psychological profiles, on the basis of which then doors are wide open for offering a variety of products and services, by analyzing the deeper motivations, values and thoughts of consumers, including the building of pseudo-friendly relationship with them.
Spreading of tentacles
Moreover, advanced variants of personalized marketing can dig up even some unconscious longings of the consumer and so create new demand, one that was actually not there in the first place. The precision of this largely automated technology, despite the growing amount of available data and the possibility of their analysis, is still far from perfect, but it is progressing exponentially and is crucial for softening the stone cold hearts of users for the exact reasons that Drmač mentioned – as long as the user / consumer is not getting something useful or interesting from advertising, they will very likely have a negative attitude toward it.
Successfully targeting their wishes and preferences can change that, and the technology certainly offers cause for optimism. The amount of monitoring daily activities of anyone who is ‘online’, or using modern technology, already now is beyond comprehension of many. Almost every service that the customer uses, however briefly, starts to spread tentacles into their life and track their interests, movement, motivation, choices, etc. at least to some degree.
Nolens volens
It can be partially assumed that the time, and the inevitable changing of habits, will do its part. Sooner or later users will have to accept advertising in exchange for payment of the content on the internet (or, God forbid, they will just directly pay for content or service), whereby better targeting of ads will certainly help. The second way in which new customs and time are working for the marketing industry is the growing awareness of the reducing scope of privacy in the digital world that is blending with the real world. It is quite clear that a large part of the population currently lives in unsustainable odds with reality. On one hand, people want a window into the lives of everyone, and will happily advertise their lives, on the other, they stubbornly believe that in such circumstances they can carefully design a picture of their lives and keep their ‘privacy’ in so far as they want.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. So it can be expected that there will come an adjustment of thinking to the new realities. Willingly or unwillingly, and until then, marketing will rely on unobtrusiveness, interesting content and chewing up unimaginable amounts of data in virtual space.