Blend in advertising

Entertainment in today’s World comes with an array of options. Hundreds of television channels, tens of radio channels, many newspapers and magazines, and zillions of websites on the Internet. This range of options is a blessing and a curse for the advertising World. Blessing, because it provides advertisers with options to target the right segment of customers. Every dollar spent on promoting a product can be spent with the right customer in mind. But on the other hand, it’s getting harder and harder to make the target audience wait and see the advertisements. That’s a big challenge which is going to increase every day. One thing that may increase the chances of people watching the ads is by blending them with the content of the medium.

Advertisers are paying special attention to make sure they are targeting the right segment of audience. Advanced software are developed to make sure the relevance and reach of advertisement maps to the target audience. This has increased the effectiveness of advertisement a lot. But merely placing the advertisement at the right spot does not guarantee a couple of things. First, the advertisement will be noticed, or even that it will be watched by the target audience. For mediums like television and radio, the customer might flip the channel and for mediums like newspaper and magazine, it might go unnoticed. Second, the appeal of advertisement on the audience at that particular moment. Let’s consider that the right audience notice the advertisement, but did this advertisement persuade the customer to buy the product (or service)? Studies suggest the chances to be less a percent on an average.

In order to address these issues, we should look at blend in advertising to make customers notice the advertisement and think about going for the product. So what do I mean by blend in advertising (I am sure I didn’t coin the phrase, but my definition might vary from others)? Blend in advertising means making the ad fit the customer’s thought process at time the advertisement appears. Think about an advertisement which appeals to the customer because it is meshed in with what they are doing or what is happening in their surrounding at that time. To make a blend in advertisement, it should be seasonal, i.e. mesh in well with the season the customer is experiencing day in and day out, it should be geo-targeted i.e. fall in lines with the region where the customer lives, it should be well versed with the time of the day the message is delivered and so on. The advertisement should also mix well with the content the customer is getting through the medium at that time. For example, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, watching a football game in the living room in a metro city, the customer will be more appealed by an advertisement which takes these pivots (rainy day, metro city, football game) into account to deliver the message. Similarly, listening to Mozart while driving home back from work on a pleasant evening, the advertisement is not an interruption if it makes sure it is along the same lines with what the customer is wanting to listen.

There are a few things that might go wrong when you are trying to deliver blend in advertising. As we can see, in order to blend in the advertisements, many variations of the advertisements need to be delivered to the customer. It is important to remember that they are just “variations” of the advertisement. The central message, the tagline and the feel of the advertisements should be the same. It is important that by delivering the blend in messages, the brand identity of the advertiser is not lost. 

The concept of blend in advertisement can be applied to any medium to make the advertisement more effective. The basic principle is to keep the central message of the advertisement the same, but change the way the message is presented to the customers to help them connect to it instantly. Personalize the message for the audience and make them believe that this is the right product to get at this time. So when the right audience is targeted with the right content at the right time, it is no more a bugging advertisement, it is information your customers were waiting to get in order to make a buying decision.