How to improve online ads with a little help from Goebbels

 
       

  
  
   
        

  
 
      
    Forty per cent of online advertising isn’t hitting the target says Nielsen – so why is it not connecting?     
 
        Column  
       Edie Lush     
    Monday, May 19, 2014 - 8:09am  
      I know I’m not alone in being cross with online advertisements. In fact, since writing articles on  Singularity  and  Virtual Reality  I am being stalked by ads for eye-tracking goggles and brain sensors. 
 At least they are vaguely more appropriate than the Facebook ads I get pushed: you can keep trying, Facebook, but I’m not going to post a picture (below) that says, ‘Far away is never too far for friends’. What does that even mean? 
 So it doesn’t surprise me that  Nielsen  said on Friday that 40 per cent of online ads aren’t hitting their target audience. It is pretty rare that I’ll ever click on an advertisement being pushed at me - even if (especially if) I’ve looked at the product before. 
 Last week the UK government announced it was about to  increase its ad spend  by 22 per cent to almost £300 million to explain deficit reduction, the Scottish independence referendum and Britain’s role in Afghanistan. Since all of these campaigns will include a significant amount of digital spend I’m hoping they are going to be hiring someone better than Facebook to do it. 
 
 
        
 
 With these stories bothering me I visited Chinwag Psych’s  conference  on Behavioral Science last week and learned a bit about what does make people pay attention online.  
 Communication guru Mark Borkowski tossed around the phrase “idea porn” while he discussed what triggers you need to get people to pay attention and make a decision to do something. In short, he says: make it funny, sexy, cute, shocking, illuminating, spectacular, controversial, topical, and with a touch of schadenfreude.  Or when all else fails, add a celebrity.   
 To be persuasive,  Borkowski  says, “appeal to the emotions”. Rather surprisingly, to do this he admitted to occasionally asking himself, “What would Goebbels do?”  
 Josef Goebbels was, of course, among the most notorious creators of propaganda and PR. Why is this? Borkowski says: "Goebbels understood the human too. He was very clear about how he went about his dismal craft. 
 “Speaking in March 1933, immediately after his appointment as Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in Hitler’s first government (a role in which he was to do more than most to ensure the evil progress of the Nazis), he said: ‘If you examine propaganda’s most secret causes, you will come to different conclusions: then there will be no more doubting that the propagandist must be the man with the greatest knowledge of souls. I cannot convince a single person of the necessity of something unless I get to know the soul of that person, unless I understand how to pluck the string in the harp of his soul that must be made to sound’.” 
 So how do you get to the soul?  Brian Massey 's advice is to focus on the brain when you are trying to get people to buy, click or read. The “bouncers" that filter out all of the “language noise” that you don’t need to pay attention to are Broca’s area and Wernicke's area.  
 To get Wernicke’s area engaged, relevant, emotional words work wonders.  For example, which one of these links for an addiction centre would you guess gets more clicks:  
  “A place of New Beginnings.”    
 or  
  “Addiction torments Addicts and their Loved Ones.”   
 Using the second title increased clicks by 184 per cent because Massey says, “Language is not just decoded, it is adorned with memory, emotion and meaning.”  Wernicke’s area is being wound up by the second title because it is “a complete story in seven words”.   
 Meanwhile Broca’s area is the part that tells you the difference between grass blowing in the wind and grass being stomped on by a tiger. It filters out the predictable and highlights the strange or unexpected. Guess which of these got the most clicks: 
   "Free Marketing Research: We hold all the secrets to internet marketing. Buy Now!"   
 or 
   "Free Marketing Research: Lousy Marketing ideas. Don’t come to our Site."   
 The second one - because it’s unexpected and inconsistent with what you’re expecting. You’re tricking Broca’s bouncers. 
 Finally, a word on pictures.  
 André Morys put people in an MRI scanner and showed them two different websites: that of Amazon-owned Zappos and a relatively unknown company called Shoe Guru. 
 Now, I am a fan of the Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his  Downtown Project , but the Zappos website, while easy to navigate, is more cluttered than sexy. Shoe Guru’s  site  on the other hand focuses on one “hero shot” of each shoe.   
 Morys’s MRI scan showed that nucleus accumbens (the part of the brain responsible for emotion) was stimulated much more when people looked at Shoe Guru than Zappos. You could see the brain producing feelings of desire, “like what you get from drugs or when you see an Apple product”. He argues that targeting the nucleus accumbens in this way gets you from “I’m able to buy it" to "I want to buy it” to “I have to buy it” as fast as you possibly can.  
 Where does this leave the government in their ad campaign that aims to convince the Scots to vote No to independence in the upcoming referendum?  More in the need of brain scientists than Don Draper, I’d wager.  ·   
       Facebook    Online marketing    Josef Goebbels