That’s the findings of a report by Mintel into the behaviour of people online. It found that consumers are more likely to pay attention to ads placed on search engines (54%) and price comparison sites (43%) than social networks (28%) and email (22%).
Couldn’t the reason behind this be simple; when people are searching or using comparison sites they’re actively looking for a specific product? If advertisements are relevant to what they are looking for then they’ll pay attention, if they aren’t then they simply ignore those ads.
The debate about how to get peoples attention online will continue and continue, but ultimately it can be boiled down to one simple factor. People don’t like being sold to, and up until the mid ’90s they just had to put up with it. Advertisements were in their newspapers and they broke up their favourite television programs. Fast forward to the 2000’s and the situation is somewhat different; people look for what THEY want, not what advertisers tell them they want. Before the internet, the man was in the information driving seat, in the age of the internet, we’re all in the driving seat and we threw the adverts out at the first service station.
The power to search is really at the route of all of this. People now have more choice and they can exercise that choice in the Google search bar. “I want chocolate covered in toffee”… they search and they shall find. Influencing people through traditional advertising is an industry surely set to die – peoples attention floats expectantly in the “I’m genuinely interested in this” camp. Mass audiences, apart from Yawn-Factor, are dwindling, because people are in control of their own information management. It raises an interesting question: if they can’t advertise to us in the open, are we going to witness a huge increase in guerilla advertising. Will they get in our minds Derren Brown style?
Now…where did I put that Dr. Pepper?
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