We have become used to this:
Headline, headline … SCROLL… another headline… skip over an ad… SCROLL…3 more headlines… a special offer… and finally… ah yes … this headline looks interesting … CLICK.

So much of our time online is spent skipping and ignoring information in a manner that we have become masterful at it. Just as we ignore anything we think doesn’t matter to us in the physical world, we are becoming ever more adept at doing so in the digital world.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) of UK does a study every year to understand where and how people spend their time online. The most recent (2016) number for the average time we spend online per day is 2hrs 51 minutes. This is a significant chunk of our waking time. No doubt, marketers see digital as a huge opportunity to get their message across by using attempts that span the whole arena of what we have come to know as digital marketing.

But there is no bigger threat to digital marketing than the increasing consumer mastery in ignoring those marketing messages; be it ads, email, product info, promotions, recommendations etc., that are being wrapped inside a variety of shapes, sizes and forms.

It is now well known that since the surge of the Internet, human attention span has been on the decline, with a recent stat showing that our attention span has become less than that of a frog (approx. 8 seconds). Therefore, marketers have been using a range of tactics: from catchy headlines to interactive content, from celebrity endorsements to news jacking, and from attractive imagery to shocking videos. In fact, today there is a whole new category with VR marketing that attempts to entice people with immersive experiences that barely hinge off a completely different reality than what we live in today.

These creative endeavors have their place in sparking consumer interest. However, when we consider that one of the basic goals of marketing is about bringing a consumer closer to actually doing business with a brand, there is one minimum bar that every marketing interaction needs to meet to be able to achieve that outcome. And that fundamental necessity is for a marketing message to be of relevance to the consumer, regardless of what that message is wrapped in.

Without relevance, a brand might succeed in achieving the metric of attention but will fail in achieving the metric of conversion.

The marketing world has been focused on packaging their messages to get the attention of the consumer. But are they as focused in targeting their messages to be of relevance to the consumer?