Consumers are bombarded with advertisements every day.

In a Sales session at Radiodays Europe, Steve Pratt likened modern advertising to thieves invading your castle to steal your gold coins.

The coins represent your attention, you only have so much attention in your treasure chest so you don’t want it wasted or stolen. The marauders are trying to steal the coins, they are the advertisers who want your attention. Every day there is a battle, the marauders attack and the people in the fort try to fight them off. Attacks now happen many times per day.

Those of us who work in media sales are some of the marauders, we want to try to get into that fort. The people who guard the fort have many ways to protect themselves: skip buttons, ad blockers, subscription services to avoid watching ads. People are getting more picky about keeping digital advertisers out.

That’s why digital ads now have a declining success rate. Eventhough there are a lot of ads on Youtube, social media and search, the sales return from these ads is usually very small.

There is only so much time you can give to advertising, but the amount of advertising is increasing exponentially. Pratt’s chart shows the amount of attention you can give per day (the fixed red line) against the amount of advertising you are subjected to each day (the steeply increasing blue line).

“There’s more competition for time and attention than ever before. When advertising is ignored it is not effective. People block it out or they just get annoyed by it.”

So what is the solution?

Pratt’s answer is: Be different. Don’t be an attacker, be a friend who is invited into the fort.

“Advertising and marketing goals are more easily achieved if you are a friend of the fort,” said Pratt, commenting that a friend can still bring advertising information in, but the information must be useful and presented in a manner which is accepted in a positive spirit because it comes from a friend.

Pratt’s ‘Fort Strategies’ are:

Don’t be irrelevant. To exemplify this point Pratt moved his slide presentation to the next slide which played an advertisement for a brand of mattress. “You’re here to listen to a presentation at RadioDays, you are not thinking about buying a bed. I bet you found that irrelevant and time wasting. This is an example of a strategy that is not what the audience wants, it is what the mattress company wants. It’s the wrong strategy.”

Bring a great gift. Don’t just be transactional, give them something to benefit their lives.

Balance and job and the gift.  He compared this strategy with the story of the Trojan Horse, a relevant example given that the conference was in Greece.

The trojan horse brought soldiers who sneaked out and attacked the fort from inside, this is not the kind of gift he was talking about. “Don’t bring enemy soldiers as your gift, be more like a friend with benefits. Your useful gifts can be things like whitepapers, information strategies, training tips, anything that is seen as beneficial to the people in the castle. They will appreciate the gift and respect the product you want to sell them.”

 Pratt used an example of his work with Dell Technologies to illustrate the point.

Dell wanted to do a podcast about their merger, branding and their new products. They were advised not to make the podcast about them, but to make it about what their customers and clients were interested in. Instead of using someone from the company, Pratt approached well known journalist Walter Issacson to host it, changing it from a Trojan Horse to a valuable gift.

The gift became Trailblazers, unexpected stories of digital disruption, not about Dell. There was no Dell logo on it, no Dell people hosting it.

“The only Dell branding was an acknowledgment in the credits saying ‘An original Podcast FROM Dell technologies.’ Not BY Dell Tech, but a ‘gift’ from them.

Our idea was C Suite education through storytelling. The job was brand positioning. The C Suite executives knew who made the show and liked Dell more because of it. It positioned the brand well with the target executive leadership audience.

 “If it’s from you it is a genuine gift, if it about you it is an annoyance,” said Pratt.

When considering a ‘gift’ strategy advertisers should ask themselves, ‘will this be considered time well spent, will the recipients remember it in a week, in 5 years.’

Lonely Forts and Personalised gifts. It can be lonely in your fort, people want to be linked with others who are like-minded. He urged advertisers to target small groups of like minded people and craft the gift to their collective interests.

Gift Differentiation.  Make it a gift that can only come from you. Craft the creative in a way that shows what is unique to you. The example he used was the oat milk brand Oatley’s radio jingle campaign.

Oatley is upfront about wanting to get people off cows milk and about its advertising ‘mind control’ approach. They are happy to send themselves up with blunt and honest campaigns. Because the campaigns are different, honest and amusing, they are successful

Be a differentiated Voice. Check out the Poo-Pourri toilet perfume campaign. Enough said.

Gift wrapping. Make the presentation memorable, not ordinary. Use creative that stands out, arouses curiosity and makes people want to open the gift. “Wrap your gift with creative stories.”

Patience. “The small 1% marketing success rate comes from short termism. You have to earn trust over time. When people are ready to buy, they will buy from people they know, trust and/or enjoy spending time with.

Radio hosts and podcasts are media that build trust and target the right groups, so audio creatives are in a strong position to use these techniques.

Steve Pratt is the author of Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers and founder of The Creativity Business.

Steve was the Director of Digital Audio at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), where he ran a content innovation lab, launched one of the world’s first legal music podcasts in 2005, and grew a highly engaged online community at CBC Radio 3. He is also the co-founder of one of the world’s first branded podcast agencies.

Download a free chapter of his book here