These days, online viewing habits frequently involve the viewer watching several different videos in one sitting. Perhaps they are trawling YouTube or binge-watching a TV show. For marketers, this is a rich opportunity for the judicious placing of ads. However, one phenomenon, all too frequently encountered, which is sure to create exactly the wrong kind of brand identification, is ad fatigue. Ad fatigue occurs in a viewer when the exact same ad plays repeatedly within a short space of time.
In television advertising, this could be the exact same ad at the beginning of every commercial break. However, in the online world, ad fatigue occurs with adverts that are usually placed within a much shorter playlist. Often, they are the only ad that plays between episodes on a streaming service or before a YouTube video. Accordingly, the irritating effects of ad fatigue on the viewer are amplified, and so too are the negative effects that ad fatigue causes for the brand.
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The Disastrous Effects of Ad Fatigue
But what are these negative effects, beyond the irritation of just seeing the same ad over and over? Well, all these consequences of ad fatigue do revolve around this one factor, but they are much more far-reaching than people realize.
Ad fatigue can have many consequences. These include:
Ad Much More Likely to be Skipped
When an ad has been seen before, its power to prevent the viewer clicking “Skip Ad” diminishes rapidly. In fact, much of this effect is down to enticement and mystery of what the ad will actually contain. If the viewer has seen it before, they don’t need to see it again; and if they cannot skip, they can quickly hit mute until its finished.
Brand Identification Will Switch from Positive to Negative
If you create a great online ad, making use of a top video production companyand marketing agencieswith high production values and a genuine entertainment value, all this good stuff will come to be identified with your brand. Nevertheless, no matter how good the ad is, once the viewer has seen it for the tenth time that day, your brand will come to be associated instead with, “Oh no, not this one again!”
There is an important thing to stress though regarding this point. Viewers seeing an ad multiple times isn’tin itselfa bad thing. In fact, many of the most successful ad campaigns of all time were successful because their effect was reinforced in this way. Rather, it is all about the time within which the ad is viewed a certain number of times. Seeing an ad a few times over the course of a week is different from seeing it in between every five-minute YouTube video.
What You Can Do to Avoid Ad Fatigue
As it happens, it isn’t just marketers who are concerned about ad fatigue. Streaming services and social media platforms are concerned about irritating their users in this way. WMV Productions, a video production company in Nashville, say that marketers generally have platforms on their side when it comes to ad fatigue.
The solution is usually a simple matter of placing restrictions on the number of times per day an ad can be viewed. You should therefore look to find platforms that are doing this and, more importantly, preventing your ad from being shown too frequently as well.
Ultimately, ad fatigue is a fundamental problem becauseif it goes on too longconsumers transition from being irritated by the ad to being irritated by your brand itself.
