Why Advertisers Aren't Reaching Any Generation (and What to Do About It)

If given the choice between an ad that gets 10,000 impressions and one click per day or an ad that gets 100 impressions and 10 clicks per day, which would you choose? The latter, because the latter indicates some degree of effectiveness that leads to measurable results.

There's a gap in modern advertising that fails to address this point; yes, you may have lots of ads and lots of views, but how effective are you at actually reaching your audience?

The Numbers

According to the latest research, nobody's doing a great job of reaching any target audience. While millennials are frequently cited as being the least trustworthy of brands and corporate advertising, the truth is people of all generations aren't thrilled with the current state of advertising.

Millennials really are the least trustful (or at least the most technologically familiar—43 percent of people aged 18-24 have downloaded an ad blocker, compared to 32 percent in 25-34-year-olds and 20 percent in most other demographics. In addition, almost all users agree that they would click on more ads if the ads were actually targeted toward them—or if the advertisers were content supporters, rather than paid spots.

What does this mean? As marketers and advertisers, we have access to more data and more technology than ever before, yet we're still coming up short when it comes to creating meaningful messages that can reach consumers.

The Solutions

The main solution is obvious (make more effective ads), but the path to that solution is hard to discern—we need to make our messages even more appealing and familiar to our target demographics. There are a few strategies we can use to accomplish this:

• Get more specific in our targeting. The first solution is to make your targeted advertising even more targeted. You have to drill down into your demographics to find more specific descriptors; for example, you might abandon the "teenager" demographic to seek "teenagers in Midwestern colleges with a strong affinity for tacos." This might narrow your pool of target users, but will increase your relevance significantly. From there, you'll need to work harder to craft truly appropriate messaging, and use the sophisticated targeting tools of the modern era to get those ads in front of the right people.
• Make ads less advertise-y. Traditional ads are pretty much dead, so you need to step away from those constructs and clichés. Instead of showing off a product or a service, show off an idea; capture someone's interest with something relevant to them, and don't advertise the product so directly. People won't trust you if they figure out you're only trying to sell to them.
• Shift to a more organic approach. In that same line of thinking, it's a good idea to invest more time and energy into organic approaches, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing, by investing in linkbuilding services to boost your organic search visibility and traffic. This isn't to say you should abandon advertising altogether, but using complementary approaches like this will allow you to hedge your bets.
• Seek qualitative feedback. Instead of relying purely on the quantitative "big data" available to most companies these days, specifically seek out qualitative feedback from members of your target demographics. Don't just measure how effective an ad was on a scale from 1 to 10—ask your users what went through their minds when they saw the advertisement, and what they might like to see in an ad instead. It takes extra time to run surveys and studies this way, and even longer to analyze the data, but you'll have a much clearer understanding of the psychology behind user reactions and, ultimately, decisions.

Social media advertising is undergoing a massive shift as platforms like Facebook and Pinterest begin introducing functionality more similar to an e-commerce platform than social media, and as users become more accustomed to mobile, interactive experiences in specific formats.

It's not enough to simply put ads on new platforms and leverage new features - we have to understand what's really important to our target demographics, then give it to them.