How To Avoid Banner Blindness in Your Advertising
We’ve learned to automatically tune out anything that looks like an advertisement. This is often referred to as “banner blindness”. Watch to hear some tips on how to make sure that your ad captures attention.
Transcript:
When you're creating ads for social media, like Facebook and Instagram, you want to make sure that your ad fits in the context of the newsfeed. There was a phrase that was coined when banner ads first became popular on the internet. And what happened was people started to easily be able to recognize what a banner ad looked like. It was usually a column image on the side of the page or across the top. And people would easily recognize that it was an ad and completely tune it out. And this is referred to as banner blindness, and it's often a really quick subconscious reaction to something that looks like an ad. So when you're creating ads for social media, you want to make sure that your ads don't look like an ad. You want it to be interesting and attractive to people so that when they're scrolling through their newsfeed, they're going to stop and take a second to look at your ad.
One way you can do this is by making your copy less formal. So your copy shouldn't include any jargon or buzzwords. It should be written as if you're just speaking to a friend or just speaking to your audience one-on-one. I also like to include emojis in my ad copy because I find it makes it just a little more light and fun and keeps the ad interesting. When you're making your media for your ads, you also want to keep this in mind, that you don't want it to be overly edited or designed. You want it to look nice, but if it's too polished or looks a little too professional, people are probably going to start getting suspicious of it being an ad and lose interest. So when you're creating your ads for newsfeed, remember that it's going to be showing up in the context of all of the audience’s friend's posts, their mom, people they went to high school with, the influencers they follow, and you want to make sure that it blends in and the more that you put time into making your ad fun and interesting to your audience, the better results you're going to have with your advertising.
