If we are all honest with each other, advertising is something that nobody truly likes. Here are a couple examples of what I am talking about. When I sit down to watch a college basketball game I often find myself frustrated with the number of commercial breaks. Every four minutes of game-time there is a scheduled commercial break that completely messes with the flow of the game. Or when I want to watch a video on YouTube and it makes me sit through 30 seconds of an ad. Sometimes they allow me to skip, but many force me to waste another 30 seconds of my busy life. Radio ads cause me to plug in my phone and listen to Spotify Premium that allows people to listen to music WITHOUT ADVERTISING. My life is already filled with enough distractions that take me away from my calling. With that being said, if advertising did not exist, the business world would look much different.
Now you may wonder why an employee of an advertising agency would write a blog about how nobody likes advertising. That is a completely valid question. My response is while people do not like advertising, they do like seeing engaging experiences of things that they personally enjoy. If you can create engaging experiences for potential consumers that are interested in what you have to offer, “advertising” will not appear as “advertising”.
Facebook and Instagram are perfect places to create these engaging experiences for many different reasons, but here are a couple.
- The average Facebook user is on their profile over 14x per day.
- Facebook is a large database that records what people like and do not like
- Facebook allows paid “advertising” to show up in newsfeeds that do not scream “THIS IS ADVERTISING”
The third reason is where I would like to spend a bit more time on. When a user scrolls through their Facebook or Instagram feed they are looking to “waste” their time looking at what their friends and family are up to. If you create an engaging experience and target the correct group of people, your “advertising” will show up in a “Native” environment. The user can then decide whether or not they want to engage with your message.