AFP, New York :
Almost 80 years old, the deodorant Old Spice is learning new tricks for finding customers in the era of smartphones and social media.
The Procter & Gamble product, having spoofed itself for years with advice on how to become more “mantastic,” posts to its 2.6 million Facebook followers a steady stream of video games, prize entries, and advertisements as short as two seconds.
Creating “thumb-stopping” content is the goal, and marketers are doing everything they can to achieve it. That includes using neuroscience to study which visual and audio cues offer the best bet to grabbing and keeping an impatient smartphone user’s attention.
Estimates show that the average person looks at his or her smartphone as much as 150 times a day. The attention is there, but it’s just not long-lived.
“You get the three-second audition,” said Frank Amorese, media director at Heineken USA. “If you are relying on the 14th or 15th second to do the heavy lifting of the ad, it’s not going to work.” Advertisers are in a dizzying race to connect with customers as new mobile-borne social media platforms emerge and evolve.
“The landscape changes every six months,” Amorese said. “It’s changing at an increasingly fast rate.”
Digital ad spending is projected to reach $72.1 billion in 2016, growing at a rate of 21 percent and now comprising almost 37 percent of the overall market, according to eMarketer. Social media accounts for $15.4 billion of this.
Almost 80 years old, the deodorant Old Spice is learning new tricks for finding customers in the era of smartphones and social media.
The Procter & Gamble product, having spoofed itself for years with advice on how to become more “mantastic,” posts to its 2.6 million Facebook followers a steady stream of video games, prize entries, and advertisements as short as two seconds.
Creating “thumb-stopping” content is the goal, and marketers are doing everything they can to achieve it. That includes using neuroscience to study which visual and audio cues offer the best bet to grabbing and keeping an impatient smartphone user’s attention.
Estimates show that the average person looks at his or her smartphone as much as 150 times a day. The attention is there, but it’s just not long-lived.
“You get the three-second audition,” said Frank Amorese, media director at Heineken USA. “If you are relying on the 14th or 15th second to do the heavy lifting of the ad, it’s not going to work.” Advertisers are in a dizzying race to connect with customers as new mobile-borne social media platforms emerge and evolve.
“The landscape changes every six months,” Amorese said. “It’s changing at an increasingly fast rate.”
Digital ad spending is projected to reach $72.1 billion in 2016, growing at a rate of 21 percent and now comprising almost 37 percent of the overall market, according to eMarketer. Social media accounts for $15.4 billion of this.
