Advertising is Not Marketing

The interchangeable use of “advertising” and “marketing” has become increasingly bothersome. Advertising, while still important, is actually a smaller subset of marketing. And in this attention deficit economy, the value of advertising is no longer what it once was.

Consumers get this because they’re the real victims in this era of Ad Fatigue. With more time on devices, more time spent on digital platforms, many brands believe that the solution is repetition. But repeatedly serving the same ads and bumping up ad frequency to ensure reach just lowers your CTR and increases the CPC. But what impact does it have on conversion…? Do you even know? Are you measuring this?

Objective-driven marketing goes hand-in-hand with data-driven marketing. And it’s getting harder to achieve objectives beyond awareness and engagement using a “push” model (unless the objective is to relinquish ownership of the relationship with consumers).

So enough of the criticism. Here are some solutions:

• Decrease ad frequency, rotate creative.
• Think of content not as something you push out, but something that pulls consumers in.
• Invest more in the destination again.
• Optimize that destination for business objectives further down the proverbial “funnel.”

And speaking of #conversion, 47% of customers expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds. 64% of mobile users expect a webpage to load within 4 seconds (via AdEspresso). For all of your marketing efforts, even one second of delay in page load time can reduce conversions by 7%.

So after all this, can we please start talking about the broader marketing plan and less about advertising, cool?