The “Target Audience” have since left the auditorium to become individuals. They no longer congregate in front of the lone TV or radio in the neighbourhood, listening and watching your brand’s message placed on a handful of programmes. They are now individuals with unlimited access to unlimited exciting contents.
Humans, formerly known as Target Audience, now have the unprecedented power to ignore platforms you placed your brand’s messages on and swipe your sponsored posts and GDNs into oblivion. Even worse, they pay premium to never see your brand’s messages. Ever.
So how do we get the attention of the most distracted generation ever?
A shift in mindset is necessary. Knowing that nobody gives a sh*t about what you are saying is a good place to start. That way, conversations between agencies and brand custodians won’t just be about how to say the brand messages “right” but, more importantly – will the message get noticed at all?
The job of agencies and brand custodians is to get attention in a relevant way. Clarity and subjective choice of vocabulary, which typically dominate conversations around a communication piece, aren’t the best use of time. We need to stop being entitled to the attention of humans and focus on earning it by creating interesting pieces and preserving the exciting value of a communication piece after it has been created.
It is only when the exciting value of a piece of work survives that we can hopefully get attention. Howard Gossage said it best when he said, “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.”
Toheeb Dele-Balogun is Co-founder/ Impact Director, The hook Creative Agency. He can be reached via iambaloguntoheeb@gmail.com/
