Bye-bye banners - other forms are needed today

BANNER ADVERTISING For three out of four people, annoying advertising is the most important reason for using an ad blocker. This has been confirmed by numerous surveys and studies. Today, other forms of advertising are kis crucial, says Anne M. Schüller in her column.BY ANNE M. SCHÜLLER*Pre-roll videos, aggressive retargeting, monstrous wallpaper ads and ultra-intrusive pop-up banners are considered the most intrusive of all advertising formats. As soon as we sit comfortably on the couch and search for something on the web, one of these things attacks us without being asked, screams at us, blocks our view, follows us and insults our senses. I call that coercion. Of course, users understand that free web content has to be financed by advertising, but not like this. If bold ads were placed over editorial content in a newspaper, nobody would accept it.Banner advertising is a money-destroying machineWhat is the point of banner advertising anyway? Open rates are around 0.2 percent, and even that is probably only because many people don't get the usually treacherously placed close button right. In addition, banners are mainly clicked by bots, i.e. machines, and not by humans. All in all, advertisers are throwing around 99.9 percent of their advertising money down the drain. Do they know that? Of course they do. Nevertheless, banners are still placed diligently, as anyone who surfs online knows, and why? Because clicks are so easy to measure? Of course, analytical key figures are important. And measurability helps to separate the wheat from the chaff. But you don't make a pig fat just by weighing it. Some management bodies' obsession with figures is truly abstruse. Frighteningly often the wrong thing is done fanatically, as long as it can be measured. However, technocrats and number freaks easily overlook the fact that what is actually important does not happen in columns of figures, but at the touchpoints between employees, company and customer.Adblockers are self-defense against advertising that nobody wantsAdvertising as we still have to endure it today will soon be a thing of the past. "Future historians will identify 2020 as the year in which advertising breathed its last," predicts Thomas Koch, an advertising expert who is critical of the industry. And why? "Twenty years of online advertising have brought the entire industry into disrepute - and turned our target groups into advertising haters." Some clever providers have set ever meaner traps for fleeing customers. And the advertisers, bluntly for the interests of the users, have made themselves pay for it, with more and more people using ad blockers out of sheer self-defense. And promptly there are programs that want to block adblockers. Some people will never get it. Those who do violence to their customers are unlikely to get their money. New forms of customer contact are therefore needed. And the solution is simple: conversations that sound like real conversations. From person to person. At eye level. And these only take place when the other person actually wants to. What kind of conversations are these? Recommendation conversations.Referral marketingIt is no longer the providers with their annoying advertising, but enthusiastic customers who share their experiences with others who will decide from now on whether new customers come and buy. An obsession with customer issues is therefore a must: organizations can only survive in the long term if customers love them and tell everyone why. The systematic creation of good reasons for recommendation is therefore an ongoing task for the entire company. At every touchpoint, it must therefore be ensured that what happens there is worth recommending and that suitable recommendation elements are incorporated, which means that all corporate measures must be designed in such a way that they contribute to positive word of mouth. The new sales and marketing guidelines are as follows:- Develop the customers who are already there into referrers.- Turn those who are not (or cannot) become customers into word-of-mouth propagandists.- For this purpose, you need a crystal-clear positioning with eUSP, i.e. emotionalizing unique selling points. Then you need "idea sparks" and "stardust", i.e. emotionalizing, inspiring ideas. Finally, communication content that fascinates people so much that they voluntarily pass it on is important. Shareability is the focus here.Shared and earned media play the decisive role in purchasingBanners are completely uninteresting. Shared and earned media play the decisive role in purchasing today. This is because customers looking to make a purchase prefer to use the web-based sound bites of third parties. The majority of all preliminary purchasing decisions are made in this way today. Opinion portals, user forums, reviews, test reports, blog posts, press articles, word of mouth and recommendations play an increasingly important role. Google refers to this as the "Zero Moments of Truth" (ZMOT), which tell of the tests that a provider has already successfully mastered with other customers - or not. On average, prospective customers access more than ten pieces of web content before making a decision. Search engines thus become connection machines that help to separate the good from the bad. And these are joined by offline influencers, i.e. experts from our own environment, whom we consult. And we usually follow their opinions almost blindly.