Guest post by Tim Brown.
I recently had the opportunity to speak to a couple classes of high school students, and used my time to dig into what and how they interact on the web and social media. I was trying to figure out what kinds of ads they responded well to on social media—but lo and behold, they’ve already grown a deep resistance to advertising.
“When was the last time you clicked on an ad on social?” I asked.
Blank stares.
“Come on guys—were there any ads in the past year that you actually looked at?”
“Well…if it’s someone I think is cool like an athlete and they’re showing a product, I might be into it,” one brave kid said.
“If it’s a video and it’s entertaining or something I’m into” responded another.
20 years ago, when ads popped up online among the content we were looking at, we clicked on them a bit more frequently because we hadn’t developed such a resistance to them. In 2016, we may very occasionally pay attention to ads, but generally consider them a nuisance.
Because of this aversion to ads, using influencers to sell products has become all the rage.