We just can’t help ourselves. No matter how many times people tell us they hate being bombarded by advertisement after advertisement, we continue to do it. Interruption marketing.

Social media and digital marketing was supposed to be the end of it. The masses had spoken and these new channels were supposed to open up the dialogue and create an organic way for brands to talk to their potential customers. Cut to present day where we get crap like this:

Now we can’t have an event (Grammy’s Super Bowl, the Olympics) without some kind of horrible, shoehorned product placement with absolutely no relevance to what people are watching/participating in. I blame Oreo, who did something intersting and timely and fun. 

However, because one brand was clever and took advantage of a shared moment – we now have to put up with terrible tweets and Facebook posts that make almost no sense (Pharrell’s hat anyone?). This isn’t ‘Real Time Marketing’ – it’s just another form of interruption marketing – like every other forgettable bit of ad copy.

This isn’t informative.
This doesn’t help me buy.
It’s certainly not conversational.

You see the stats every day – people are tuning out  ads and following less brands online. Can you blame them? We promised them a dialogue and when we earned their trust immediately started selling to them. Like I said, we just can’t help ourselves.

Let’s be better. Let’s create content that helps consumers and informs them. Optimize it the right way and make it easy to find, so that when they’re ready to engage and move forward, so are you. Forget real time marketing and focus on anytime marketing. A far more fruitful and cost effective way to do business.

Posted by
Gary Edgar
on 10/02/2014