Ads – Superavi

There are countless businesses that build their value on the back of ads. Shamefully it became the default reaction to “what’s your business model? Advertising”. Because of this, ads became more hated than ever. Yet there is barely any supervision for the content that is in ads. With the absence of supervision in this space there is a major opportunity: To grab the last touch point, and make it useful and workable for the customer. Let’s dive in.

Trust the medium?

Newspapers are a medium, a format that ads are distributed through. As well as charging companies to place adverts, consumers paid to read the papers, and therefore to see the adverts. Before the rise of the internet, the monopoly over information that people wanted to read made it feasible to charge the two sides of the market, the customer and the advertiser. Newspapers were better the more distribution they had.

As power accumulated so did money. Norms started appearing, and with them a code of conduct. Many of the people who worked in the information business were creatives. For example: journalists, editors, and photographers. This led to the creation of unions, enforcing the code of conduct and ethics. People ended up buying the newspaper for its name which symbolized some sort of truth. Authors were relentless in their pursuit of the truth while telling a good story. Today most people don’t know where an article came from “I just saw it on Facebook”, let alone who wrote it.

People spend less writing time per article today in comparison to the past. Articles are distributed through undifferentiated platforms and mutate according to the platform. Likes are dismissive, comments are mostly superficial – three words or an emoji. Mini boredom is solved by minimal non-obligatory interactions and people have short attention spans.

Ads kept their place in this world, dollars follow attention and distribution, not ethics. Ads moved where the information did; after all, ads are also some sort of information that someone wants to provide. An ad’s trustworthiness is created by grabbing attention and using public / attractive figures. These address the truth or utopia, whims of dreams.

Trust the distributors?

It is always said that when you control the distribution you can control the knowledge. Only in the past there were more layers to filter ads, based on the content that editors wanted to correlate with their brand and standards. But a paradigm shift happened, the choice now belongs to the people. Your friends can post whatever they want to and companies can target whoever they feel like. Because of scale, there is less of a critical eye being cast over what is exposed to the public.

The other day a friend of mine wanted to publish a campaign on Instagram. He filmed his music studio, but upon uploading it the Instagram algorithm claimed that text appeared in his video, thus blocking the campaign. In response, he requested that they look at it manually because it, in fact, didn’t include any text. A few days passed and they approved the campaign. AI is not smart enough to even determine whether there is text in a video, I don’t expect it to judge the content anytime soon.

Big money was always in the game. Many newspapers and media companies are owned by political bodies. That’s exactly the reason that today if you pick up The Guardian you know what to expect, and the same is true if you watch Fox News. Most platforms don’t have anyone editorial, or legal, looking at anything that comes online. Until recently nobody was interested in standardizing ads, their content or their mechanism.

Trust today’s solutions?

Throughout history, many people have tried to avoid specific types of content, ads among them. One of the key marketed benefits of having a remote control was to skip a channel when ads are on TV. When VCRs arrived people recorded shows and fast-forwarded ads. People loved the concept of controlling the content. Today cord cutters also prefer it to cable TV because they want to see what they want to see without ads. In fact they care less about where the content came from, and are more interested in just consuming it.

As an example, Netflix built on the lack of care shown by customers and so did cable companies. But now TV companies try to differentiate themselves because they do care about exclusivity, and therefore want to create a lockdown mechanism. Once it is strong enough, I believe that even paying customers will see ads again.

2016 was a big year for Ad Blockers. As the number of people who installed an Ad Blocker rose above 20% the advertising industry and the distributors realised it’s a big problem. The reactions varied:

Block every user that has Ad Blocker from watching any content
Make a paywall for content without ads and give away some content for free
Show parts of the content
Beg for users to remove their Ad Blocker
Say they ethically request users to remove it so they (the distributor, content maker) can support themselves.

But only halfway through the year, new voices arose calling for ads to be standardized. These voices looked at the problem at hand. With today’s accurate tracking and personalization, why would people block ads? The answer is that ads are a jungle full of clickbait ads, spam, viruses, ads that hurt the user experience and take over the whole screen, ads that play sudden loud music or open unwanted windows, the list goes on. So they decided to try and work on standardizing ads, and at some point, they will have some teeth. But in the meantime…

People discovered Ad Blockers and even if there were some ads they didn’t mind seeing, they just wanted to get rid of it all completely because the bad and interruptive ads outweighed the good and targeted ads. Ad Blocker was such a hit that it caught both Apple and Google’s attention. We can already see seeds of their work in updates they did recently.

Apple’s cookie tracking blocker mechanism in IOS 11’s Safari has reportedly cost media companies around 200 million dollars. Google is bringing an integrated ad blocker to Chrome. Probably to block everyone else’s ads and prioritize their own. They are both trying to prevent users from choosing services like adBlocker Plus.

This kind of service makes its money by allowing specific ads to go through the filter. This allows them to get paid, it’s their business model. Do we trust Google more than we trust adBlocker Plus? I really don’t know, but it seems like it’s a good idea to be able to avoid a monopoly on this front. It seems that the EU is also eying this area.

Who to trust?

Privacy and ads seem to be an especially good opportunity for aggregators that have a leg in the hardware world. Why? Because hardware is the actual touch point for the customer. You could argue that you watch Netflix on TV but I would argue that you watch TV!

For many years hardware companies took the wrong steps to catch up with startups and software companies. Among these wrong steps, we have the cases of bloatware (adding unnecessary apps to your phone, hoping that you will use them), and creating competing software that wasn’t good or innovative enough etc. But now it seems companies like Apple and Amazon understand that they will never have a better app than a competitor that is working on it exclusively. By becoming a smart aggregator, and applying regulations and ethics, the last touch point can become the only touch point.

Here are a few examples:

Apple pulling out an app from the app store because it’s competing with a service they are about to launch, or inappropriately using one of their devices.

Apple’s TV app aggregates TV shows and movies from all the apps that are installed on the Apple TV. If you add Apple’s future original content it’s a very powerful touch point.

Amazon creating an API for developers to use Alexa, controlling what information they give to developers.

Facebook’s single sign in, which allows users to signup and protect their information to a certain extent.

It is essential for hardware companies to know what’s going on within each app that is on their devices. Of course Facebook will never agree to give Google all its info about what you do on your device. But in reality, Google look at what you type on your keyboard, and they also know how long you spend in the app. That is already very valuable information.

Imagine you are watching a TV show on live TV and when the ads start the TV blocks them, or changes the channel to something else (your second option) until the ads end. Imagine the TV making sure you watch an ad that is relevant to you, like on the internet. Instead of watching a tampon ad you’ll see a PlayStation game ad. Imagine physical ads on the street that will react to your profile.

I believe that this is the future that companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook imagine. A future where controlling the touch point allows them to set rules that will make the user experience better, that will target us personally with things that interest us (or that will affect us – depending on how dark we want to be). The company that controls the last step of the interaction, the physical touch point, is the company that can call the shots. This is one of the main reasons why every big software firm tries to branch out into hardware.

When a user is using your software the user is your product. You will do anything in your power to retain them and you will make money out of them however you can (ads, upgrades etc.). When a user buys your device the user is your customer and the device is your product. You will do everything you can to make your device better. Thus you will want them to have the best experience possible. Ads wouldn’t interest you because it’s not how you’d make money. You’d make money by selling your device and creating the best experience. And that wouldn’t include ads, unless you are a newspaper 🙂

Users consume content in a vacuum and it is usually mute. This is a short guide for designing for the mute scroller. How to grab their attention and make sure that your message gets heard…even in mute.

Why mute?

In the Communication Pyramid I mentioned some reasons for mute consumption of content. These reasons are linked to the comfort and discomfort of consuming video. Here are some reasons that relate to sound:

We don’t like loud unexpected sounds — for example clicking on something and abruptly hearing a loud soundtrack that you never asked for.
It’s rude — because other people didn’t ask to hear what you want to hear, especially on public transport.
We are at work and don’t want people to know we are watching videos.
It’s a standard for most apps.

Every Snap, Instagram story, Facebook video, starts mute. Upon action, the content will come alive with sound. But does it? To be honest, mobile phones’ sound quality is shoddy and since most of today’s consumption is on a mobile phone, why bother? The smart thing would be to ask, where to bother?

An incentive to click on the video. The post tells us what it’s about and what we are about to hear if we click it.

Users stop!

All interactions are chained to whether people look at your content. For users to absorb your content you need to make them stop and look at it. In reality, many users will do little more than pause to take a cursory glance at your content before they continue scrolling. There is an average conversion rate of 10% for posts, and 4% in newsletters.

I once tried to put an ad on a Medium post I wrote on Facebook. Here are the stats: 12k Facebook exposures, 900 Clicked through to Medium, 100 read it, I got 0 recommends.

The result

There are many facets to fix to make things better but here I would like to focus on typography and video.

Design for mute

In Subtitles were never designed. The missing element in TV typography design I talked about the importance of subtitles. So here is another good reason to do it. Not every person has a budget to create a mini action movie to make people pause and see his content. Not everyone knows how to produce a show-stopping visual frame.

Imagine you’re walking down the street. How many people will make you turn your head after they pass you? How many will grab your attention? How much of it is positive vs negative attention? How much do you remember from walking down the street? If you stand in the street and look at somebody, what can you guess/know about them?

yeah you are angry, but what are you talking about? I don’t know and I probably missed half of it by the time I pressed play. But yeah I’d stop down the street and look at this guy!

Well, this is what typography is for. This is why there are street signs. They give you glimpsable visual information. Some places are busier like Tokyo and some are less, like a highway.

So if you are not a movie producer and you’re not hot the alternative is typography and content. This is a way of grabbing attention by highlighting what’s important in the video.

Good use of subtitles in the French elections

Fast content

A video is the easiest consumption method when users are comfortable. But hey, sometimes users are not comfortable. Sometimes they walk down the street and don’t have time to watch your video, or are just about to get off a bus. So hit it as hard as possible from the very beginning.

Editing is extremely important. The ability to let the observer see the music and imagine how it sounds is the essence of editing. For the mute scroller, it might give them a reason to stop.

Here is an example of a new channel in Israel that shows great editing and can also be seen in mute.

Design for sync

Video content pieces just stream. It gives users the feeling of missing out (if done well). But in some cases, it takes users some time to make a decision along the lines of: “It looks interesting, I actually want to hear what this person is speaking about”. If you use typography syncing the user in would be smooth. The user will be informed because he can read what it’s about, and now he can just continue experiencing it.

Typography is not just static. We want to share a feeling and draw users in, which means we need to trigger the right mood. The way the text animates informs the user if it’s a sad/angry/happy story. Nowadays I wouldn’t post any video without subtitles that are matched for the platform in terms of size. But to enhance it further you need to look to the areas of pace, color and size, where much more can be done.

A Facebook example

Facebook recognized this and helped users create these gradients with text. The reason that people turned away from writing is because they believed users would always look at a video or an image, it’s bigger and better at grabbing attention. I think it was a smart decision by Facebook because it works, especially when mute scrolling. People stop and read — if it’s not too many words.

Breathe…

I’m a sound lover and I would love to see a platform that can give me the Facebook feed in audio only. All of these quick consumption platforms are in the business of mini-boredom. They just fill up the empty pieces of our lives. Instead of gaining observation and sociability, we consume isolated from our surroundings. The good thing about sound is that it’s not fully taking over, it’s a secondary sense that enhances your reality rather than replacing it. It comes together and doesn’t take over.

I can’t wait for a world where everyone has an implant in their ear which gives them added information. Personally, I see it as more valuable than AR or VR. I know it’ll be less exciting and grandiose. But it’ll be more intimate, human, and helpful. In any case, I know the future will be exciting, escorted by voices in our heads. In the meantime, we’ll keep on scrolling.

Tag: Ads

Where will ads live? The answer: Hardware