Is your consumer ready to hit Buy Now? Are they Banner (ad) Blind?

You are on the tube, metro, subway or train - school run, reading the latest news, article from the Times, Daily Star, Sun or Metro. What is your ability to soak in information?

At what point should you be served an advertisement or a piece of marketing comms?

In-moment targeting, situational analysis

If we as marketers knew the answer to this, wow what a difference that would make.

Situational marketing or as I like to call it in-moment marketing is something that has piqued my interest. Location-based marketing isn't anything new, but the ability to join the dots on data points has significantly grown, creating something entirely different, situational analysis.

Marketing depicts that the customer journey is divided into a funnel, fully accepted, adopted and implemented across both B2C and B2B companies, that funnel loosely breakdown into - Awareness, Consideration, Intent and ultimately purchase.

In reality, over the last ten years, + marketing or indeed advertising has morphed into a direct response game with every advert having a direct response CTA "call to action" - catapulted mainly by the sheer growth data and data use "Data, Data Everywhere."

44% to 0.4% WOW!

The first banner ad CTR in 1994 was 44% which has since dropped to a staggering average of 0.4%.

The first banner ad was part of AT&T’s larger “You Will” campaign (Banner Ad Here), which included a series of television commercials featuring predicted scenes from an internet-enabled future—in many cases quite accurately. (One failure: AT&T predicted video calling, but not mobile video calling, imagine FaceTime taking place in a phone booth.) For reference see the YouTube video campaign … seriously cool the predictions.

AT&T 1993 "You Will" Ads

86% of Consumers Banner Blind

With research and reports indicating that 86% of Consumers suffer from Banner Blindness. (this is an old statistic, but nonetheless cause for concern), most recent report from Kantar (Dimensions Reports) 8000+ respondents over LATAM & EMEA, collectively the eight markets cover two thirds of $400 billion global advertising spend.

73% of UK consumers had seen the same ads 'over and over again'

Only 11% said they 'enjoyed' advertising

71% of respondents expressed criticism/frustration over excessive frequency.

54% prefer to see ads that are relevant to their particular interests and needs

56% are concerned that more tailored content might comprise their privacy

Source: Kantar Dimension 2020 8,002 respondents

Buy Now - Click Here - Shop Now - etc..

Have we forgotten the importance of top-funnel activity? Piquing the interest and laying seeds in the subconscious and being aware that potentially when serving that piece of content on the train the user isn't able to follow through on that CTA or doesn't want to as they are Window Shopping? Is situational awareness, targeting an opportunity to tackle banner blindness, low engagement, bring back the traditional funnel approach and use direct response at the optimal time?

Situational Analysis 

An interesting company to take note of and that i have worked with is MyMyne. I really love what they are doing on a data level to unpick the customer journey and understand in-moment targeting.

In a cookieless world, they have mapped out 320 Situational Segments, and have over 1 Billion data-points linked to research panels. Alongside the situational segments, they mapped out a number of factors that affect engagement for each situational segment like;

Stress, Focus, Energy, Time, Connection Quality

MyMyne has also mapped out 5.5 Million Situational Journeys consumers may follow, in the example below we can see 6 steps;

School Run | Coffee | Sneaky Peak | Quick Bite | Dual Screening | Browsing in Bed

Notice connection quality and time align only once in the journey (Browsing in Bed), is this the optimum time to go for the Buy Now for the example customer journey, is (Sneaky Peak) and (Dual Screening) the “intent” part of the sales funnel?

I asked John Regan, Founder of MyMyne for his thoughts:

With mobile browsing minutes already at 81% of total browsing and mobile use increasing throughout the pandemic, the environment in which we are browsing, our ‘Browsing Situation’ is an increasingly important factor in how audiences engage.

'Browsing Situations' like; how relaxed or stressed we are, environmental distractions, emotional energy, how much time we have, the speed, strength and security of our data connection, all now have increasing influence on how we engage.

A hassled parent rushing their kids to school, dealing with the uncertainty of post lockdown protocols stealing a quick look at social media in a ‘School Run’ situation, has a higher stress level and less time than the same parent 90 minutes later browsing, whilst enjoying a ‘relaxed coffee’, and recuperating after a busy morning.

In one situation the right, brief, message may resonate well with the stressful situation, whereas in the other the parent has time to engage with that brand more. Both have their merits but they may require different messaging and media channels.

Each time we browse our ‘Browsing Situation’ is different, and the way we engage with online content, changes . Situational Targeting allows advertisers to understand how to engage with audiences at different parts of their daily ‘situational journey’.

320 Situational Browsing Audience Segments

We’ve been testing our 320 Situational Browsing Audience Segments with a number of brands in different verticals and the results have been very interesting. Firstly, and reassuringly for me, there’s a significant difference in audience engagement between the segments. At first glance, in some instances, the differences we’ve seen are not intuitive. For example, those in a “Sneaky Peak’ situation (workers in an office environment browsing while they should be working) on average, browse for twice as long as those in our “Homeworking” situation.    Situational Targeting describes how audience behaviour changes throughout the day as they progress through their ‘situational journey’. In line with what we all know about the marketing funnel (Awareness, Consideration, Intent, Purchase) we’re finding the most effective results come from optimising content to situations, rather than simply removing low engagement situations from the mix

A good example of this is a cosmetics brand we’ve been working with. Their challenge is that Lockdown and mask wearing has significantly changed the behaviour of their audience. In the current environment they need to market ‘above the mask’ products like skin toner, foundation and eye makeup. Client research showed us two important things: 1.Contrary to popular belief we’ve not all gone back to browsing on our desktop in lockdown. Our ‘Attractions’ sub-segment (Theme-park ride queues)  proved highly effective! 2. With limited ability to test products  in store, cosmetics audiences are heavily reliant on user generated content (UGC), like comments and recommendations, and ‘virtual makeup’ (either through downloaded apps or online), when making a purchase decision.

This means Situational Targeting is a key factor. Looking at the 5 factors of each situation we can see how each influences engagement with our cosmetics brand: 

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Stress:
The audience needs to be in a relaxed, indulgent frame of mind to engage with virtual makeup technology.

Focus:
With limited ability to physically test, cosmetics purchase is research based and so ‘Browsing Situations’ with limited distractions are more effective.

Energy:
Tired audiences do not engage with virtual makeup 

Time:
The research element of the purchase process also takes time and so situations where the audience have time at hand are important.  

Connection Quality:
Data signal strength needs to be good enough to use ‘virtual makeup’ and browse UGC.

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The most effective uplifts were achieved by creating a funnel which, in many ways, was the opposite way around to traditional funnels. Brand awareness and repeat purchases was achieved by high impact, low content messaging in low engagement segments, and larger value purchases were driven with content rich experiences in high engagement segments.

Achieved 130% growth

By targeting the right Situational Segments, versioning and personalising with the right message, we’ve achieved 130% growth in virtual makeup tryouts, 40% growth in engagement with user generated content. In the short term this translated to a 30% growth in online purchases, however with the significant growth in virtual makeup tryouts we expect this growth to increase further. These figures are over and above those used by their existing digital campaign.

Seriously interesting stuff, thanks John.

Want to discuss more about in-moment situational targeting drop me a line here or indeed John at john@mymyne.ai