Banner Blindness, also referred to as ad blindness, is one of the more interesting marketing concepts you should know about. Why? Because ignoring it can cost you a fortune.
Understanding banner blindness can make you the deadliest marketer in the room. Here’s what it is and how to avoid it.
“Banner blindness refers to a selective attention phenomenon, where internet users tend to ignore or overlook ads.” (Publift).
Think about your own digital experience.
As you browse sites, watch videos, or scroll through social media, what happens when you see an ad? You ignore it.
So much of our browsing behavior is automatic and subconscious that you have no idea how many ads you ignore. A fun exercise is counting the number of ads and promotional links you see in a session.
The numbers will astound you.
If you’re an entrepreneur or advertiser trying to capture people’s attention using ads, this is bad news.
In fact, this phenomenon is one of the most important bottlenecks to any ad campaign.
Who cares if people are “seeing” your ad if they’re not seeing your ad?
This gives impressions that share a whole new meaning for those paying attention.
There’s a place for the subconscious lift that banner ads yield from a brand-building and awareness perspective, but most of us are running direct-response ads.
So, what to do? The answer is obvious: Don’t look like an ad.
The highest-performing ads across all platforms look the most like whatever organic content looks like within that platform.
Obvious? Yes. Easy to accomplish? Obviously not, given how many get it wrong.
In order to be successful, you have to learn and understand the personality of each individual ad platform.
An ad that works on Instagram won’t necessarily work on TikTok. They’re two different ecosystems with different personalities—even if you’re targeting the same users.
This also flips the conversation about production value on its head.
The more you invest in production quality, the less likely they look like real, organic content. Because they’re not, duh. Users aren’t spending tens of thousands on video production or editing, and neither should you.
One of the best ways to approach production is to outsource it completely and work toward aggregating user-generated content (UGC). When done right, this looks organic because it is organic.
UGC may be the gold standard, but it’s more difficult to produce than normal ads. Why?
Because you have to talk with, pay attention to, and incentivize your customers (God forbid). There’s a “herding of the cats” aspect that turns a lot of advertisers off. So, they continue to opt for self-produced ads (and even try spoofing UGC) instead of just doing the work.
Our best-performing ads at Solutions 8 have had little to zero production value. It’s generally me walking down the street or John in his poorly lit cave of an office. The content is great, but the ads are crap. But if they work, are they crap? Or are they brilliant?
What about you? I’d love to know what approaches have worked best for your business when creating and testing ads.