Advertising, Interruptions, and the Terminator

How to make the interruptions of advertising less disruptive.

Advertising has always been about being an interruption. Whether it’s an effort to grab your attention, or encouraging you to do something that you might not have otherwise done, it still comes down to interrupting your life in one form or another.

By making ads informative, educational, or entertaining, advertisers strive to limit the effects of these interruptions while also trying to resonate with their target audience. The goal is to interrupt the right people at the right time in order for the right message to reach them. When the right message reaches the wrong people at the wrong time, well, you run the risk of being the annoying guy at the movie who takes a call on his cell phone right at the climax of the film.

Yeah, you don’t want to be that guy.

Fortunately, with the rise of analytics, we know more about the audiences we are targeting than ever before. Today, we can better understand their behavior, which means the interruptions that traditionally come with advertising no longer have to be so disruptive.

With the right understanding and interpretation of analytics, it’s easy for advertisers to know if you are in the market for a car, and in turn, provide you with the proper car ad right when you need it most.

In many ways, it’s like providing your audience with an ad playlist that is customized to their likes, dislikes, wants, and needs.

Yes, it can be a bit creepy if you look at it from a strictly “robots taking over the planet” point of view, but I think we are still a ways off from having John Conner coming back to save us.

Think about it. Wouldn’t it be better if the ads you produced and the messages you developed connected with your target audience at a time and place where your product or service mattered most? And wouldn’t your audience benefit from this as well?

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