Interruption Marketing: Rumors of its Death have been Greatly Exaggerated
Posted on: January 5th, 2009Welcome to the Avangate Blog, the place to hang out if you have a software business.
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This is a guest post by Neil Davidson
Walking round Times Square last week, its 23-story billboards reminded me of the extravagant uselessness of peacock tails. It’s an advertising arms race for our attention, locked in an ever-escalating stalemate of mutually assured distraction. Despite passing through it three times, I can remember only one advertisement:
Sure, this advert is big, but it’s not its size that’s impressive. It’s how it’s different that stands out. Charmin have spotted that the 150,000 “eyeballs” that pass through Times Square each day aren’t worth squat, but that 150,000 daily butts are. It’s a demonstration of how advertising matters and how, even in the clutter of Times Square, it’s possible to stand out. Not by being bigger, or brasher or brighter, not by sticking to the measures that your competitors define, but by being different, by choosing a different axis to be judged on, by redefining the rules.
As Seth Godin says, you should create purple cows: products that are remarkable. Products that people want to talk about. But no matter how hard you try, your cow doesn’t always end up purple. Sometimes you’re stuck with a product that is merely good, or a product that people simply don’t want to talk about. Like hemorrhoid treatment. What do you do then?
You create a remarkable advert, and you interrupt as many people as you possibly can:
No facts, statistics, details or testimonials here, just a great story that makes you smile.
Interrupt people when they want to be interrupted. Here’s the nozzle at a gas pump in the UK. At the time I saw this, gas in the UK cost the equivalent of $9 / gallon. That’s $200 for a full tank. This advert succeeds because it’s an unexpected, witty and welcome interruption.
Create adverts that tell stories. Here’s an advert, part of a series, for Air New Zealand that I saw in San Francisco:
This tells a story in two frames. It states the beginning and an end but leaves the middle up to us. What exactly happened to that woman in New Zealand? Who did she meet, what did she drink, where did she go? You could squeeze a whole movie in between those two frames.
The new conventional wisdom states that interruption marketing is dead. We’re so bombarded by billboards, t-shirts, pop-ups, television and magazines that we’ve developed an immunity to advertisers’ messages. There’s no point even trying to interrupt us. You’re just wasting your money.
I disagree. It’s hard to interrupt us, but it can be done. Not by being loud, but by being different. Be witty, tell a story, and tell it to us when we want to be interrupted, and you can leap out from the clutter.
Neil Davidson is co-founder and joint CEO of Red Gate Software. His blog is at http://blog.businessofsoftware.org or you can follow him on twitter
Tags: marketing, Software Business
Neil Davidson
January 5th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Thanks Neil
good post. Two comments.
1. You wrote: Interrupt people when they want to be interrupted. I’d argue that if you want to be interrupted, it’s not spam, it’s a form of permission.
and
2. The problem with the clever billboards and such you mentioned i s that they don’t pay for themselves the way they used to. If they did, the New Zealand tourist board would run millions of them. Media costs are based on an old level of attention, one that has plummeted.
January 5th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
I’m not sure people ever “want to be interrupted” in the active sense. That is, take a poll of people asking if they “want” to see a commercial in their TV show and most say “no.”
In these examples, perhaps it’s not interruption at all. The Charmin’ example isn’t interruption — it’s solving a pain. The Napoleon example is (mostly) entertainment rather than a pitch.
I agree that people who say “advertising is dead” have it wrong, and most traditional advertising is probably not worth the return on investment as Seth points out.
I love your main message: That you have to be interesting, and that advertising that’s interesting is still interesting, even today. Also I share your annoyance at the blanket “old marketing is dead, long live new marketing” statements that dominate nowadays.
Thanks for a great post!
January 6th, 2009 at 12:26 am
Good reminder, Neil. In every form of communication, whether conversation or interruption, we need to make people laugh, think, empathize or join. If you can do that well and consistently — if you can delight — the delivery mechanism doesn’t matter.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:31 am
While I agree that interruption marketing is the preferred route, it cannot be the only strategy. The goal should be opt-in email lists, web ads based on search results, RSS feeds and many other clever approaches. The reality is that I don’t visit the Coke website, nor am I on an email distribution list or read any Coke blogs… I do however get flogged with Coke Zero placements way too often (probably more times than I can count). How else would I know that it taste great and is zero calories?
re: The Air New Zealand advert… perhaps a marketing person gets it… but most (all!) people (especially cat people) are not zipping home to book a trip to New Zealand based on that board.
January 6th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Seth,
Thank you for the reply! Both, of course, very good points.
- Neil
February 27th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
[...] to produce something different, not just a boring ad… but rather à la @Neil Davidson in his interruption marketing post. Well, we didn’t quite match Napoleon & the Hemorrhoids, nevertheless we did come up with [...]