How To Get Consumers To Pay Attention to Your Ads

ADVERTISE SOMETHING THAT THEY ARE INTERESTED IN!

Again researchers are showing us anew what common sense has said all along. People pay attention to stuff if they already have an interest.

A new study by researchers from the Netherlands and the University of Michigan used eye tracking and timing equipment to measure what really got subjects attention. The answer: their attention went to where their interests lay.

What is the lesson here for us trying to market our brands? It’s to find channels of communication that have the greatest access to people who we know are interested in our product.

Old school: spend heavily in mass media, broadcast your message to as many eyeballs as possible and hope for the best.

New school: narrow your communications channels to those outlets where you are most likely to find customers actually interested in your product.

Posted by Harry Chittenden

Social Media Press Releases: Not there yet

PR professionals have recently struggled to upgrade the press release to accomodate the social media revolution. Late last spring, Todd Defrin and Shift communications offered up a template to do just that. You can download the template here.

Now Edelman in conjuction with the Univesity of Alabama has produced its own version. I read about it on Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion.

Both of these versions provide a ton of information. Praise be to them. But as a person who doesn’t like to read great gobs of copy on the Internet, I’m going to work to find a way to give the project the same scanability as a well-written press release used to give. Putting the “Ws” in the lead graph (who, what,…etc.) is still a great service to the reader, who can then choose to dig deeper or not.

Posted by Harry Chittenden