Avert your eyes; consumers do...

What a week.  Those of you following me on Twitter or brave enough to listen to Joseph Jaffe's Across The Sound #77 already know that I've been on vacation this week.  You also know that jetBlue (definitely in the running as my new least favorite airline) lost my family's luggage, which contained not only all of our clothes for the trip, but also the power supplies for my laptop, Blackberry and mobile phone.  Luckily, before I left I wrote some blog posts in advance, timed to publish automatically while I was away.

A quick trip to the Cingular store was all it took to get my phone and Blackberry running, but it was a solid five days before my replacement laptop power arrived by FedEx.  Five days without broadband Internet access can make a man do some strange things.

I actually watched primetime network television.  Not time-shifted primetime programming.  The shows that the networks run, at the time the networks choose to run them, without the ad-skipping intervention of my beloved TiVo.

But even without intervening technology -- whether a DVR or just a choice of screens -- I still missed most of the 30-second spots.  The content came to a stopping point and I checked the fridge, began leafing through a magazine, started a conversation with my wife, even stared at the couch cushions.  And let me tell you, it all came quite naturally -- just like in the old days before time shifting, place shifting, and double- and triple-screening.

Sure, I didn't miss every ad (but of course we DVR users don't miss every ad either) and as an industry insider I know that I'm not exactly a typical viewer, but still I'm struck by just how effective an ad blocker the human mind can be.  We all know that TiVo didn't invent ad skipping -- and advertisers have long questioned the validity of the Nielsen ratings (even while dumping the vast majority of their dollars into television advertising.)  But it has been a long time since I've personally had to watch TV unfiltered and the experience was telling.

Now, lest we digital marketing geeks feel like gloating, eye-tracking studies have proven that web surfers are "ad blind" as well.  This isn't new news, but it's worth repeating as more ad dollars shift to digital channels.  We owe it to our clients and ourselves to spend those dollars wisely. Traditional ad units just don't cut it, not because of leading edge technologies but because people just aren't paying attention.

As evidence of digital ad blindness, here are two images that we use at Digitas to show our clients just how easily consumers ignore traditional online advertising.  The first shows a page with standard banners and skyscrapers in the usual spaces.

And here's the same page with overlaid eye-tracking data showing that consumers can pretty effectively screen out the ads without the help of ad blocking technology (the hotter the red the greater the attention; the deeper the blue the less attention consumers pay.)

This simple and natural human behavior -- and not just the supporting technologies -- is why the tired, old tactics of interruption advertising simply don't work.  New marketing approaches and brand content look pretty smart to me right now.  It's good to be back. :-)