It has happened to all of us on one occasion. The television advertising break catches us with our attention on TV and the ads are listened to and, after seeing one of them, you can’t help but look at whoever was next to Czechia B2B List you and ask ‘but what is it announcing?’ Nor is it very strange to stay after seeing the ad with the feeling that you have not been able to understand what you have had in front of. Perhaps it is too creative, perhaps my mind is too tired, one repeats himself, looking for an excuse to understand why that announcement was not understood. Perhaps, and this is another of the excuses that one gives himself, is that this ad is intended for other people.

It may seem that the ads in which the consumer does not know very well what they are saying or what they are advertising are a mistake and one that everyone sees clear from the beginning, but the truth is that that is not exactly what they have last. Over the last few years, there have been many examples of these advertisements and many also those that have won awards and appear in analysis texts about what is being done with them. Critics of this type of advertising call them advertisements for creatives or advertising for advertisers and claim that with this type of messages, in reality, creators only want to show off to other creatives and to other companies in the sector. Advocates of these ads often point out that it is smart advertising, thought-provoking advertising in which the consumer is not given everything ready-made.

Advertising for advertisers no longer works
Consumers go straight from so-called creative advertising, museum advertising, “smart advertising” or “advertising for advertisers” (put whatever name you want to use here) and they don’t get those messages. The traditional creative advertising that has occupied the pages of magazines, billboards and newspapers for so long despite its creative and illustrative charm no longer works.

Directly, they ignore them and do not make an effort to unravel them in order to understand them. In a world where everything goes so fast and where consumers receive so many messages every day, these types of ads work as a kind of drag. Consumers are not going to stop to understand you, no matter how cool the idea may sound when you are creating your message in the workroom.

This has been shown by a study by the American University of Maryland and the Dutch University of Tilburg. Today, to reach the consumer, it is best to bet on simplicity. Why keep it simple and why avoid incredibly complex ads where you are giving clues but not really telling everything? The key is in the format and in time. Those ads could work when the recipient views them for a long time and with their full attention. In a world dominated by the internet and with increasingly limited service windows, that is impossible. “The problem is that the advertisements that worked in this scenario will not work in short exposures”, explains Michel Wedel, one of those responsible for the study.

Experts have looked at how ads are now viewed by consumers and how that impacts smart advertising. In today’s marketplace, consumers avoid seeing ads, and if they do, they don’t pay much attention to it. Ads are visible at a glance. And if things are seen at a glance, complex elements lose power of attraction and lose power of seduction. According to the conclusions of the study, “mystery ads” (those in which the consumer has to decode the message and which are, it could be added, many times those ads that end up making the consumer wonder what exactly was being advertised ) now get much less positive reviews than simpler ads.