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Hey, Marketeers! Ever Heard Of Cognitive Dissonance?

This article is more than 2 years old.

During a very enjoyable and highly participative class session on Thursday as part of a marketing management program, I revisited one of the issues that most concerns me regarding the evolution of advertising, and particularly the online segment: patterns of cognitive dissonance between marketing managers and users.

For example: that Burger King campaign from 2017 in which a 15-second ad used the magic words “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?”, to trigger home assistants and smartphones into reading out the company’s Wikipedia definition, which they previously edited to it’s nicest version ever. While some people protested the misuse of their device, others were editing Wikipedia to make it say nasty things about the product, and Google was trying to prevent that kind of use, the advertising industry rewarded the “imaginative” campaign with a Gold Lion at Cannes. Yesterday, in my class — which I repeat, was a delight in terms of interaction, especially considering that I was the “evil” professor contradicting the general industry consensus, bringing the bad news and raining in their parade — most of my students considered the campaign an award-worthy stroke of genius.

There are many such examples: somehow, the advertising industry finds it “fun”, “daring” or “audacious” to do new things even if they annoy us, in the same way they found pop-ups on the Internet a great idea, an annoying format used years ago that even got to the point, in many cases, to using various gimmicks so they couldn’t be closed easily.

What’s is the problem? Fundamentally, this is cognitive dissonance on two levels. The first is obvious: advertisers not putting themselves in the shoes of people whose home assistant or smartphone is triggered by the ad and starts talking unexpectedly. Since this type of campaign takes place over weeks or even months, we’re condemned to experience the company’s “great idea” every time as the ad is aired. If the first time is not particularly amusing, by the nth time we are harboring dark fantasies about what we’d like to do to the idiot who came up with the “wonderful” idea.

But there is a second level of dissonance: if the idea in question is particularly original, or happens to work, or sparks conversation, what can we expect other companies to do, following the twisted logic of the advertising industry? Exactly: copy it. It’s the problem of unsustainable strategies and what happened with pop-ups until companies like Google were forced to devise ways to do away with them.

A case of cognitive dissonance on two levels: first, not putting yourself in the place of the person on the other side; the second, not thinking about the sustainability of the communication strategy, or what will happen if other brands copy it. The result is a happy industry, delighted to have met each other and giving themselves awards at festivals because they think they have achieved something, while the rest of the world hates them and tries to avoid their genius idea.

It’s the same with hyper-segmented advertising: while the advertising executive responsible is delighted with himself for finding a way to pursue us and force us to watch her wretched ad for the umpteenth time while trying to navigate, we’re having nightmares about our devices listening in to our conversations.

The online environment is no different to any other: it has its protocols and its ways of doing things. The only thing that sets it apart, possibly, is that many of those protocols are not yet fully established due to the relative novelty — for some — of the experience, and there may still be many users out there who are unfamiliar with them. And while breaking those protocols may seem cool, daring, or that word the ad industry loves so much, transgressive, to the rest of us it’s a drag.

If you’re in the advertising industry and thinking about these kind of strategies, please try to frame them in terms of cognitive dissonance. For some time now, marketing has been removing itself from the way we experience it, the result of which is that the vast majority of people hate ads, and some are even willing to move heaven and earth to block them or confuse them. What happened the first time someone asked users for real whether they wanted to be tracked or not? Oh, surprise!! Some 96% of them said no way!! Isn’t anyone surprised that companies like Netflix are so successful precisely because they don’t have any advertising at all?: we would rather pay more than endure it.

If you are into marketing… at least consider the possibility that you might be suffering a case of cognitive dissonance. Please, get some help.

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