The decade of the free
Are you imaging a new 60's free love decade coming on? No ok good. What I'm talking about is the emergence of products and services free for the consumer and paid for by advertisers.
Now you would all be familiar with this free concept through TV. Unless you are using Pay TV you get the main channels and entertainment free. But the catch is that you have to endure constant ads every 8 or so minutes. Most of us seem to have accepted this fact. If we want to watch TV we have to watch ads. And we can always flick to another station. But how would you feel if advertisements starting encroaching in other forms of your entertainment?
Imagine this. You are huddled up on the couch, under a warm blanket. It's raining outside and you are reading your favourite novel. You are engrossed in the story and have hardly glanced away from the pages of your book for over an hour. You then turn the page and see an advertisement. How do you feel? Probably frustrated by the intrusion and not really in the mood to take in a new product, service or brand.
Some marketers say these advertisements will pay for our books and the consumer will someday enjoy free books. Great, free books at a price. Now I'm sure I'm not the only marketer asking myself how effective is this advertising really going to be? A person enthralled in a book is surely not going to read the ad before moving on to the next page, are they? Let alone take in the information in the ad, or be in the mood to act on any of the information they have seen in the ad.
The other obvious one is the internet. The vast majority of content on the internet is free. How do these web companies make money - the advertisers. But as we become more a customised to seeing banner ads advertisers have to step it up to be noticed and achieve the same results as the year before. So now when you go to a website you often get a pop up ad over your screen, that stops you from seeing the website you have gone to. Another intrusion frustrating the users which cannot be good for the advertisers themselves.
As a marketer myself, I think we need to think back to the fundamentals of marketing. The key to marketing is finding a gap in what people need and filling that gap. Finding unfulfilled needs and creating a product or service that fills that need, not trying to create the need in the first place by saturating the market with ads.