The Blissful Neglect of Advertisers
The only thing worse than marketers ignoring you is their attention.
As if we did not already have enough to feel aggrieved about, there’s this: Nearly half of Americans (44 percent) feel neglected by advertisers.
Who actually feels abandoned in this way should not be terribly difficult to figure out, but it might surprise some otherwise bright individuals nonetheless. Those feeling ignored and overlooked are not poor people with little money to spend but, according to data from iHeartMedia and Pushkin, these forsaken consumers are, in fact, white suburbanites making more than $100,000 a year.
Advertisers overlook them for a number of reasons, apparently, some of which even they don’t seem to grasp. Marketers “tend to be youth obsessed,” appealing to an inordinate degree to “next gen customers,” an iHeartMedia spokesperson says. What so-called creatives in the marketing world don’t want to spend their workdays doing is catering to middle-class white people who live in the ‘burbs —what, not so long ago, were called “squares.”
To study this demographic, and people your ads with paunchy, balding dads who coach Little League and listen to Smashmouth in their Ford Broncos wouldn’t be much fun, unless, of course, they were made sport of. Who wants to find out what really excites an HR “rockstar” mom who, driving home in her Honda Pilot, drops by Whole Foods? No self-respecting advertising executive—especially when they drive a Ford Bronco and like Smashmouth—wants to make ads for them.
The marketing professionals I know don’t want to do that. They like to think of themselves as trailblazers (“the herd of independent minds” was Peter Viereck’s coinage) and want more than anything to be “on trend.” This is the case even—especially—if they are themselves the white suburbanites pulling down more than $100,000 a year.
So they would much rather make ads that flatter their own sense of themselves as hip even if it means bypassing millions of consumers with gobs of disposable income. It’s much better, in the eyes of advertisers, to have ads starring fashion-forward young people, the more “diverse” the better. That, I’d submit, is why you see far more interracial couples in ads than in real life. There is also, increasingly, at least one ambiguously androgynous pairing just to keep the yokels guessing.
People can feel resentful about all this if it makes them happy to do so, but the same research suggests that they should be grateful. Being considered unimportant by advertisers and therefore overlooked sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
Marketers who are aware of this disconnect seem to believe that they can reach “ignored consumers” through “personalization,” by which I think they mean maddening text messages and other irksome interruptions to daily life. But I’m not certain of that. Surely, they are cooking up plenty of other annoyances that we’re not yet even aware of.
Will they work? Nobody knows, but I hope not. And here too the same research might be evidence in support of my suspicion. Sixty-eight percent of consumers say they already “hate being trailed by targeted ads and are twice as likely to hate personalization via artificial intelligence,” as Marketingdive.com reports. “Despite such ambivalence, $9.5 billion is projected to be spent on personalization and hyper-targeting this year.”
Suit yourself. Just include me out.
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