I was recently interested in seeing a movie which I like, I could have watched this on ‘NetFlix’ but it just happened to flick up on my T.V search and I noticed it was on a Free-to-air channel – which means endless advertising segments cutting in at clumsy times, which disrespect both the film producers and the viewer in equal measure. Anyway, I decided to take a look and simply freeze the action at the first ‘Ad Break’, and simply fast forward through the Ads to reach the movie; once you do this you are no longer in ‘real time’ and you can continue to do this throughout the film, minus annoying Ads!

Anyone who uses a digital Set Top Box (STB), which means ‘everyone’ in Australia these days, can do this. So it dawned on me that I cannot possibly be unique, this must be what a lot of people also do. And we know that T.V advertising isn’t cheap! So there we have 10’s of thousands of dollars worth of advertising simply being ‘fast forwarded’.

Of course, these days consumers and viewers have a lot of options. Paid digital television streaming, via the internet is extremely popular. Netflix being the big one, but several operators are active in Australia.

OK, this situation raises some further questions about advertising, and how people respond to it these days. It is an interesting area because this is what so many people depend on for marketing their biz, or promoting their not-for-profit cause, getting their message out there to the right people.

We know that social media is popular, statistics tell us that here in Australia a vast majority of adults frequently use Facebook, with sites like Instagram, Twitter & YouTube also being strongly popular. So really the intelligent response to this social reality is to respect the numbers, and discover how to communicate with people effectively on these apps and sites.

The concept of ‘Content Marketing’ is not new, but I think another modern behavioral reality, that of using ‘Adblocking’ software gives us a very good reason to take the idea of promoting our ‘thing’ via digital content very seriously.

From a purely practical standpoint developing good quality content makes incredibly good sense. People are changing the way they consume content, this much is clear, and advertising in the traditional sense simply isn’t very effective, or cost effective.

For many people this presents a puzzle. That is why so many Facebook business pages merely reproduce the T.V style approach, people attempt to get their advertising in front of as many folks as they can. But this also is not effective. People do not wish to have endless advertising clogging their newsfeed, and they seek to avoid it.

So, what is the answer to this riddle of modern people detesting advertising, and diminishing revenues from sponsors, falling metrics?

Welcome to the restructuring of marketing as a whole.