Get Your Freq On
Ad frequency is a common consideration for advertisers (this being the number of times a person is shown the same exact ad).
We know it takes more than one interaction, but how many is too many?
The paper Battle of the Brand: Brand Attachment Inoculates Against the Negative Effects of Ad Repetition has some interesting findings.
The Toleration Range
2-5 ad exposures seems to be the sweet spot before it becomes annoying and negatively impacts brand perception. (At least for traditional media, digital is a different ballgame.)
Brand fans can tolerate a higher frequency.
stronger personal brand attachment slows ad wearout
Identity Threat
The study found that people sometimes perceive repeated ad exposure as a threat to their identity.
Everyone experiences in negative thoughts about a brand as frequency increases. BUT people with strong brand attraction generate more positive thoughts about the brand in response.
Basically an identity protection response by the brain. “I’m a Starbucks person so I can’t be too annoyed by this Starbucks ad.”
The antidote to ad wearout is personal connection.
Are you going to get out of the way and stop making things that are about you and instead start making things that are from you, that people are looking forward to and value?
A question from Steve Pratt that more companies need to ask themselves about their marketing.
Especially owned channel / content marketing.
People don’t just want to know what you make. They want to know what you’re made of.
At Blue Ion, we’re big into help brands uncover, articulate, and share their mission, vision, and purpose. Which means we’re always collecting compelling thoughts about these ideas.
I like these from Dr. Michael Gervais
Vision
Vision is like this compelling future that I see, I imagine, and it is so compelling and beautiful and electric to me that I want to work towards that future state.
Purpose
Purpose is the deep why that you’re here.
To get deeper, ask another why.
Is SEO for AI all about vectors?
Instead of relying on exact keyword matches, search engines now use vector embeddings – a technique that maps words, phrases, and even images into multi-dimensional space based on their meaning and relationships.
3 strategies mentioned:
- Add semantic topic modeling to your keyword research mix
- Focus on where topic meets intent over keywords
- Make good content (which means make it for humans, not bots)
Of course, the best way to find out what AI might think about your content is to use AI to tell you.
YouTube is making changes to avoid the most annoying ad placement occurrence on the platform, a midroll ad cutting off a sentence.
Starting May 12, 2025, We’re improving the quality of mid-roll ads on YouTube. That means we’ll show more mid-roll ads at natural break points, like pauses and transitions, and fewer ads where they may feel interruptive or cause viewers to abandon the video, like in the middle of a sentence or action sequence.
Another example of AI (I’m assuming) turbocharging contextual features.
As a follow up to my post about Alexa+, this is the inflection moment for voice assistants.
Adding “true” AI capabilities will either expand their use cases and, therefore, adoption. Or it will prove that they’ll merely be an extension of other tech and not a new platform of sorts.
GenAI as customer lock in
Alexa Plus is $19.99 per month on its own or free for Amazon Prime members — a better deal, considering Prime costs just $14.99 per month or $139 per year.
Prime is the digital version of Costco or Sam’s Club. People pay a membership fee with the expectation of receiving more value through savings. Then a bunch of secondary benefits sweeten the deal.
By paying a fee, members are more likely to spend money to justify the initial fee to themselves.
Amazon’s primary retail customer is Prime. Everything else funnels there.
via The Verge
Promotions and sales are a lever. But if pulled too often they become your brand. (See: JCPenny)
discounting and promotions in general is a place where retailers all too frequently get caught up in the short-term goal of juicing sales, get caught up in the short-term goal of taking advantage of promotional environments by using promotions as a lever, again, to drive conversion and the short-term.
what gets very dangerous there is that you can really erode the value of your brand.
Competing on price is hard.
Compete on something that makes you unique and use sales and promos as sprinkles.
The 2024 holiday shopping season proved splintering is still the trend.
One other thing that I saw was this growing divide between higher and lower, and middle income consumers.
There really is a growing divide between people who feel pretty good, are spending, they’re going out to eat and those who are pinching pennies.
you see a growing split on the haves and have-nots within retailers.
…
It sounds like the haves and have-nots are really maybe going to be the water we’re all swimming in as we enter this new year.
Like when a frozen pond cracks, the splinters are still spreading.