10 Reasons Ads Are Dead

We are immune to advertising. Sorry folks but it doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t worked well for a while and the future looks worse.  

How do I know this, let me give you 10 reasons why…. 

1. 1. My kids NEVER watch commercial television. They only watch shows on the DVR and always skip all of the commercials. They, and anyone under 30, will NEVER, EVER pay attention to ads.
   

2. We can get all of our product information on demand exactly how we want it with RSS, custom homepages, Google Alerts, and on and on….
   

3. Most ads are terrible and have no message for the reader/viewer/your potential customer so readers/viewers/attendees have been ignoring them for some time.
   

4. An editor of a major industrial magazine told me that the reason to advertise with them was that it drove traffic to your web site – guess what, most customers just skip the whole trade magazine step and go straight to the web sites that are geared toward them and their concerns.
   

5. Blogs – this is where real, honest, and trusted conversations about most products take place, why get your info from someone obviously biased when you can connect to a community and get the REAL story.

6. Ads are a one way interruption and that is just rude. Let me read the real story, if you have one, unfiltered and unbiased and free of spin and puffery (I love that word).

7. Did I mention that most industrial ads are boring, unimaginative, unhelpful and a ridiculous waste of the reader’s time?

8. They are static and become obsolete very quickly.

9. The only reason to pay for an ad placement is viewers or more accurately the POTENTIAL for viewers. Less and less people are subscribing to magazines and I believe the ones that still do subscribe do not spend as much time reading….so less eyeballs. Same holds true for trade shows where attendance keeps shrinking.

10. We know you have your best interests at heart and not ours, until convinced otherwise and ads are not convincing.