Creating Contrast: Combating Clutter in a Crowded World

Posted on by Liam Sullivan

I’m the key demographic. As a young adult who hasn’t quite settled into his purchasing habits yet, people want me to lock in and buy their products.

How do marketers and advertisers get my attention? For me, the answer to this is pretty easy. Creating Contrast. There’s an overload of content and information pushed upon the public each and every day, especially young adults. As young teenage and college students develop their own personal preferences for products and services, the targeted demographic for businesses is the youth.

As a generation locked into our phones, social media, the Internet and television, there is no lack of opportunity to reach us. But grabbing our attention (and then holding it) is hard to do. You need to do something radical to get my attention. For example, sponsored tweets on Twitter are simply not going to hold my attention unless it’s creatively constructed or contains a cool product I’m already interested in.

I follow about 400 accounts or people – mainly consisting of news outlets, friends, colleagues and fellow students – and so to stick out in my busy and always chock-full Twitter timeline takes a whole lot. I often times will miss things that my friends tweet out only to be asked, “Hey Liam, did you see what I tweeted?” Nothing is more embarrassing than missing something important on social media that one of your best friends posted. If that’s how I am with my friends, it’s clearly infinitely harder for a business or corporation to break through that mold and grab my attention.

Another example of my (and my generation’s) ability to tune out media messages on social media is through Facebook. Facebook now has sponsors that pay money to advertise directly on my timeline and on sidebars. I have been on Facebook since my sophomore year of high school and can’t remember the last time I clicked on a Facebook advertisement. I don’t think I have ever (knowingly) clicked on a Facebook advertisement. Ever. That’s five years of using Mark Zuckerberg’s baby without ever being drawn in by an ad that companies are paying boatloads of money for.

The craziest thing about my personal social media consumption is that I feel like I’m either 100 percent locked in to my social media feeds or I completely ignore it. Being an avid media consumer and as someone who aspires to work in media himself, I am more likely than not to be paying attention to my timeline, but from time-to-time I definitely check out. This habit makes advertiser’s job that much harder. They need to make their ad that much more “clickable” so that the money they continue to pore into creating advertising content becomes worthwhile.

One example of an ad that I clicked on is:

I am an avid sports fan and this tweet was clearly intended to show up on my timeline. I love the NFL and while I don’t follow the official NFL Twitter account, I follow a lot of players as well as broadcasters and analysts who cover the sport. By taking one look at the people I choose to follow and by looking at the tweets and links I tend to click on, it’s pretty easy to see why this tweet from the NFL was chosen to pop up in my timeline.

To be honest, I had to do a double take to even realize that this tweet was a sponsored tweet on my timeline and not from a user I follow. That’s a huge win for the NFL. That should be the goal of every single corporation: Make the user forget that the tweet is really an advertisement. And guess what? After seeing that tweet, I followed the NFL account. The NFL won. And so did I.

 

An example of an a sponsored tweet that appeared on my timeline that I didn’t think was successful at all is this tweet by the Washington Post:

 

 

I just didn’t think that it was successful for reaching me personally. I am just really unlikely to pay for a year’s subscription to a newspaper when I get a free subscription to the New York Times by being a Syracuse University student. While as an aspiring journalist I do follow a lot of prominent journalists and accounts of various publications, I am not going to be spending money to read content simply because I am a poor college student.

I don’t think that this tweet was successful due to who it reached (me) but I do like the picture included with the tweet. There’s a lot going on graphically to make it an appealing tweet and it obviously worked because I did notice it. But, creating an advertising tweet that captures the attention of it’s audience and also gets that member of the audience to buy or purchase the product is tough to do. Not every tweet accomplishes both goals and this one certainly didn’t either.

This question we were assigned with answering in this blog became very interesting and I loved the opportunity to take a step back and evaluate my media and consumer habits. I hadn’t thought about companies using Twitter to rack up revenue. I typically think about Twitter as a way to see what’s going on with the world and my friends in their worlds. It’s really interesting to think about how much the Internet knows about each of our interests. It’s honestly a little bit scary (think Big Brother from 1984). But overall, it’s an awesome tool that more business and publications should tap into. It can take your product to the next level. And the average Twitter user probably doesn’t even know it’s happening.

 

Until next time.

 

-Liam

@Liam_Sullivan_

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