“The idea that people are too busy to engage is a myth, anyone who is on Tiktok is not too busy! What they really are is overwhelmed.”
The 2024 Elevate ADMA Global Forum in Sydney today is exploring future trends for marketing growth and challenges such as Australia’s new privacy legislation.
With 450 delegates in the room and 400 more online, the conference aims to help marketers and advertisers get ahead of the latest trends.
Opening the conference, ADMA CEO Andrea Martens said “the scale of the changes and the need to adapt is unprecedented” for marketers at this time.
ADMA’s current mission is to “reimagine the marketing industry for the future” and help marketers “understand how to responsibly use and safeguard customer’s privacy rights.”
In helping marketers reimagine and elevate what they do, keynote speaker Tom Goodwin urged them to focus on the simple things that matter.
“Our jobs are hard, but they’re not necessarily complex or complicated if you focus on the things that really matter.
“Marketers say things that sound true, but are not necessarily really true. People are not hard to reach, they are easy to reach but they are hard to engage.
“The idea that people are too busy to engage with brands is a myth, anyone who is on Tiktok is not too busy! What they really are is overwhelmed, overwhelmed with information, with what’s happening in the world.”
Advertisers do a lot of nonsensical things if they don’t have real world experience of what people are really thinking and feeling, according to Goodwin. Make decisions that “you know in your heart will work,” rather than just being driven by data that may not have realworld outcomes.
“We’ve falling in love with change and complexity,” he says. This results in marketers being embarrassed to say something that is true but seems too simple, but they shouldn’t be embarrassed to push ideas that are simple but true.
“People say voice interaction or AI will kills brands… it’s just not true, there is no evidence to suggest that new things are going to kill brands. Valuable brands have never been more important. Brands will always be important in a world where people are overwhelmed. Brands are a way for us to navigate the complexity of things we don’t understand.”
Customers just need “a tiny bit of information” in their heads about a brand to make them feel comfortable about it according to Goodwin. Marketers and advertisers don’t need lots of information or too many ways to engage with the brand, they just need to know what is important to their audience and be respectful in the way we interact with them.
Presenting examples of strange AI generated ads, Goodwin asked, “did a human being ever look at some of the ads that are served up to people on websites by automated advertising?”
“In our search for sophistication, we have lost common sense.”
Goodwin says advertising is ore than just media buying, “it is so much more than just appearing at the right time and place.” The job of successful a marketer is to create an environment that will make people comfortable and familiar with your brand, so they will buy it when they need it.
There are two basic types of approach for advertising, you need people to feel something or you need people to buy something now. “We are obsessed with attribution and moving money to the point of purchase. Those that decide are completely removed from reality… we need to fall in love with the consumer and to use common sense about the basics of branding.”
Godwin says advertisers are “chasing a lot of metrics that are completely useless… Clickthrough rates do not really lead to sales.” He urges marketers to have “a proper discussion” about which metrics that actually matter to the consumer and which ones can be ignored.
AI has become a marketing term. “The entire AI landscape has become very vague… many companies are using the idea of AI just to promote themselves. It reminds me of the term ‘big data.’ One day we woke up and there was big data, but nobody really knew what it was. What we really mean is sophisticated systems and applications.”