The Ultimate Guide to Knowing Why People Don’t Skip Advertising

Ad skipping is a generalized behavior every marketer should be conscious of. But why some people decide to watch ads.

The river flows downstream, the hot air rises from the ground, and viewers will be avoiding ads. It’s the new normal in Adlandia. Please don’t ignore the majority. But in some cases, people decide to watch, to engage, to be entertained. Why is it so?

Last week, I wrote a mini-successful piece on why people skip ads, successful relative to my young blog standards. An intriguing comment received on LinkedIn challenged me to write about the opposite and interesting behavior: why people DON’T skip ads.

Here are 3 reasons why:

• Because you’ve entertained them — advertising always claimed to be a form of entertainment, but this positioning might be more relevant today. We want to run away from the neverending news cycle, the worries and anxiety of the times. We want a quick snack of fun. But we don’t have hours anymore. In the past, we could dedicate a full evening of uninterrupted viewing to a movie. Today we’ve replaced that undivided attention with a split between our streaming and social media platforms. How powerful is the following example of a 6 second ad. There is almost zero need to mention the cause advertising

• Because you’ve elicited emotions, preferably positive ones — we love a good story, and examples of good stories delivered in 6 seconds or less exist (anyone thinking about Print or Out of Home here?). In Online Video, a fabulous example I have is from our brand Sheba. Does it not leave a smile on your face?

• Because they are not in front of the screen anymore — I know, it’s an inconvenient truth. People don’t necessarily skip by clicking the skip button; they can move their eyes and attention to a different direction: to another device, to another person, to anywhere else than your wonderful creation. It is not an omnipresent behavior, but still a growing one, fueled by our craving to dedicate our energy to multiple screen devices at a time.

Photo by CardMapr on Unsplash

Originally published at http://sorinp.com on September 30, 2020.