Hike #7: Digital Media: Exploring the Vast Opportunities While Managing Digital Clutter

Hello dear readers, and welcome back to a brand new edition of the marketing summit trail. In this weeks edition, we are going to dive into the various marketing opportunities presented by digital media as well as the challenges that come with them. The main advantage of digital media is that there are various promotional platforms to choose from which offer a lot of creative freedom, such as: Display ads, Social Media ads, Influencer Marketing, Video Ads and so on. These opportunities are also the cause of a very pertinent challenge, which is the capability to stand out from the masses of other digital media ads that consumers are being confronted with on a daily basis. In order to do so, your brand could consider to do research about web design trends to make sure that it aligns with current customer wants and needs. Another useful recommendation to stay competitive in the market, is to choose the types of advertising that you are going to put out strategically. As there are many types of advertising to utilize, but not all of them will be suitable for the target market that you are trying to reach. Factors that should be taken into considerations when making this choice are:

• the concentration of your target customers

• where your target customers are the most accessible and

• where your target customers most actively engage with your advertisements.

Digital vs Non-Digital: When to choose which?

There are lots of opportunities that can be offered by digital media advertisements. However, sometimes it might be preferable to choose a non-digital platform to put out your advertisement. Examples of traditional advertisements are: print ads, direct mail ads, television ads and radio advertisement.

Quite recently, a trend has emerged in which brands have predicted that their spending on advertising on non-digital or traditional platforms will increase (Moorman, 2022). And there are a few good reasons why this shift in investment would be a good idea. One of them is related to the excessive amounts of advertising that people face online everyday, also referred to as Digital Clutter. These large amounts of online traffic lead to the consumer being desensitized to these type of advertisements which lowers the amount of consumer interactions. Whereas the engagement with traditional advertisements has seen an increase (Moorman, 2022).

Moreover, non-digital advertisements are easier to interact with as they are tangible products. Which could allow for increased levels of viewability, as well as evoking a possible emotional response and enhanced memory recall (Yec, 2024).

However, there are certain limitations to traditional advertising methods which would make digital media the better option. This dilemma is also very much related to the target audience that you are trying to reach. If Gen-Z is your intended audience, it would make sense to utilize social media platforms rather than newspaper ads as Gen-Z spends a lot of their time on these platforms. But if senior citizens is your target market, it might be very fruitful to advertise on radio, tv or other traditional advertisement methods.

In addition, digital media marketing offers the opportunity to send your advertisements to a global audience rather than being confined to a certain location, which would be the case with, for example, TV ads. Other benefits associated with digital marketing solutions are the fact that they are easier to track in terms of their performance, by means of Google Analytics for example. Lastly, choosing digital marketing solutions is generally cheaper than investing in the traditional ones (Team, n.d.). So the choice between digital and non-digital ads really comes down to the audience, your budget, but also the presence of digital clutter in todays society. Therefore, a possible solution could be to utilize both in order to get the best of both worlds.

Cutting Through the Clutter and Consumer Engagement:

A Battle for Online Attention

As previously mentioned in this article, there is a vast amount of digital advertising out there. Therefore making it harder for individual brands to stand out from the crowd, as they run the risk to offer 'more of the same' to the audience. In order to deal with this media overload effectively, the advertisements must contain a unique or creative element that immediately draws attention to it. Therefore, brands must be clever when it comes down to the decision-making of their content of their advertisements, as well as what they post on social media. Cutting through the clutter can be achieved by means of the following:

#1: Make sure the content you put out engages with the senses of the target audience. If your company manages to create distinct stimuli, it's more likely that consumers will stop and engage with your content and cuts through the effects of desensitization. This can be achieved by utilizing music or compelling visuals for example (Randazzo & Randazzo, 2019).

A way in which this can be achieved is by means of influencer marketing and/or video ads, influencer marketing utilize the visual effects of video, in which they can also implement music add other visual effects to their posts to make it more engaging. As well as gaining an insight into an actual user of the product rather than promotional material coming straight from the producer. A good example of influencer marketing is GymShark for their "66 Days: Change Your Life Challenge" (16 Influencer Marketing Campaign Examples [+ Key Takeaways], n.d.) in which they collaborated with influencers "TwinMelody" who have a large following as so called sports influencers:

Source: Modash

As Gymshark managed to secure these influencers with a big following, within the right nice. They managed to run a successful campaign. While using the engaging benefits that TikTok brings with it such as music, captions and visual video.

#2: Your company must be aware of the content that is already out there. Repackaging the same information or producing similar ads is most likely not going to work. However, do not solely do this by emphasizing the product too much but rather wrap it into a bigger whole, a story perhaps, to make it sound less commercial for the consumer. Communicate why your company, product or service is unique compared to everyone else. Another useful way to counter digital clutter is to put out content that is unique to your brand, by means of providing insights or data that can be found nowhere else (Sowden, 2024).

Once you have identified the message you are going to put out, make sure it is concise, readable, creates a sense of urgency and remains within a defined frame to separate the ad from other content. Visuals and animations can also be utilized to support the message. An example successful utilization of social media marketing is DisneyPlus:

Source: DisneyPlus

As you can see, the message or title in this case is immediately readable "Herby Fully Loaded", it is concise and creates a sense of urgency as it mentions at the bottom of the page that it is "Now Streaming" on Disney Plus. Meaning that you should check it out now. Besides it is supported by plenty of visuals to engage the audience and created within a distinct frame to set it apart.

#3: When choosing a digital media tool, it must be completely clear who the brand is targeting and which platform they interact with the most. In this way, you bring your content to the consumer rather than letting the consumer search for your content on the wrong platform (Sowden, 2024). Besides, your advertisements will not be seen by the right audience if they are posted on a platform that they rarely engage with.

For example, take note whether your target customers are active listeners of podcast. In that case using podcast and audio marketing would be ideal. If they are frequent users of TikTok or Instagram it might be a good alternative to create specialized ads on these platforms or even use influencers to promote your products or services. An example of podcast that uses this is the 'Get Sleepy' podcast which I occasionally listen to when I can't sleep. Every episodes always starts of with a special mention of the sponsors and usually promotes products that relate to sleep, such as mattresses or meditation to help you sleep. This is really clever, considering that the audience will most likely be interested in these products or services as they are listening to a podcast that helps them sleep.

Lastly, brands could consider whether to use inbound or outbound marketing to reach their audience. As inbound marketing is more tailored to a niche audience and requires more effort to make it successful whereas outbound marketing is more focused on promoting material to the masses with little customization. Depending on the target customers, this could make the difference between getting customers to engage with your content or becoming part of the digital clutter.

My thoughts on Consumer Engagement and 'True Classic'

According to my analysis, the content that stands out to me the most are usually the ones I can relate to, that trigger my emotions in some way, or the ones that speak to me in a personal manner. When scrolling through social media, I sometimes catch myself pausing and looking at an ad that relates to a topic that I am interested in or have recently sought after. For example, at some point I was interested the Wim-Hof method which includes training that integrates cold exposure and breathing exercises. So every time I would see a social media page or ad that talked about either breathing exercises or cold exposure, I would stop for a second to look at the content that I saw in front of me. Sometimes even clicking on the page to see what it was about.

Other aspects of ads that usually make grab my attention, is when the ad is personalized in a sense. For example, social media ads or display-ads on websites that indicate an offering that is bound to your location. It is attention grabbing as it makes you explicitly process it, because it applies to you personally. Such as, an offering about driving lessons in your hometown or window cleaning services in your area. However, I rarely interact with these ads unless they offer me something that I value at that moment.

Lastly, an effective way to grab my attention is by integrating humor into the advertisement. There is one ad that I have seen multiple times before on social media that I watch every time, simply because it is very funny. It is an from the brand 'True Classic' and promotes T-shirts in a very original and sometimes slightly absurd way. In one of their ads they promoted their product by creating a parody of the Notebook. This is one of the brands that I would consider creating testimonials or reviews for as no other brand has managed to capture my attention as successfully as they did. They even managed to make me click on the link to their website and engage with their content, even though I was not looking for their product in the first place. Personally, I have never encountered an ad that was comparable to this one. Obviously, it is not new to implement humor into advertisements, but somehow True Classic has managed to transform this into a little cinematic masterpiece. It is the level of absurdity as well as the delivery that makes me laugh every time.

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Sources Used (APA 7th):

·        content: MarketingSherpa, design: Scott McDaniel, code: Steve Beger, MECLABS. (2016b, January 7). Marketing Chart: Which advertising channels consumers trust most and least when making purchases. MarketingSherpa. https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/channels-customers-trust-most-when-purchasing

·        Instagram. (n.d.). https://www.instagram.com/p/CrzHrBeBDQz/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=0a393b7d-1ae2-4e54-8485-c06234911c83&img_index=1

·        16 Influencer marketing campaign examples [+ key takeaways]. (n.d.). https://www.modash.io/blog/influencer-marketing-campaign-examples

·        Moorman, C. (2022b, May 24). Why marketers are returning to traditional advertising. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/04/why-marketers-are-returning-to-traditional-advertising

·        Power, R. (2023, 4 september). 3 Ways to break through the digital clutter to increase customer retention. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rhettpower/2023/09/03/3-ways-to-break-through-the-digital-clutter-to-increase-customer-retention/

·        Randazzo, S., & Randazzo, S. (2019, 6 augustus). Marketing Strategies to Cut Through Digital Clutter - Spin Sucks. Spin Sucks - Professional Development for PR and Marketing Pros. https://spinsucks.com/marketing/reduce-digital-clutter/

·        Sowden, T. (2024, August 12). How to cut through digital clutter and create content that gets noticed. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2021/09/28/how-to-cut-through-digital-clutter-and-create-content-that-gets-noticed/

·        Team, A. E. C. (n.d.). 9 benefits of digital marketing. https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/digital-marketing-benefits

·        Yec. (2024, August 12). Three reasons brands are exploring Non-Digital channels in their advertising strategies. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/theyec/2021/09/28/three-reasons-brands-are-exploring-non-digital-channels-in-their-advertising-strategies/