Cutting Through the Noise

Close your eyes and try to remember yesterday. Not three years ago, just yesterday. How many brand messages did you see? How many do you remember?

Probably very, very few.

The average American sees around 10,000 marketing messages every day. YouTube ads, product placement in your favorite show, billboards, banner ads, and sponsored posts on IG. Marketing is not just an annoyance. It is the toll we pay for so much of what appears to be free.

Google is a marketing company. Meta is a marketing company. TikTok is a marketing company. You pay for their multi-billion dollar operating expenses every time you click an ad or watch a sponsored video.

More importantly, they are incentivized by quantity, not quality. The more ads they can show you, the more money they can make. The goal is not to provide you will a great video platform to learn shuffle dances. The goal is to get you as close to giving up on the platform because you are sick of the ads without going over the line. To maximize the number of ads you see and maximize their revenue.

So when the platforms are incentivized by quantity, there are two ways to cut through the noise and make sure your ads are remembered. Quality and quantity.

Let’s talk about the stupid one first. Quantity.

This is often the play for massive, multi-billion dollar brands. Buy all of it. If there are 1000 ad placements, and we own 900 of them, people will remember us. This can be incredibly powerful to drive the ubiquity of a brand. Slowly, culture will either embrace or reject that brand, and when it is embraced, it can become a potent driver for brand loyalty. Imagine for a second Coke bought every single ad space in New York. The citizens of New York City would quickly reject the gaudy capitalism and big business or, more likely, wear it as a badge of honor. Home of the Jets, Wall Street, and Coca-Cola. Sorry Atlanta.

Whether you’re a massive company or a tiny mom-and-pop, there is a better way to cut through the noise and have your customers remember you. Quality messaging.

What makes a marketing message high quality? The design? The copy? The strategic positioning? Yes. But I would argue most important of all is the latter.

It is a natural human truth that the brain is constantly filtering out the noise. You don’t actually see all 10,000 marketing messages every day. At least not consciously. Imagine if your brain had to stop and consciously determine if every highway billboard was relevant to you. I’m not sure anyone would leave the house. Instead, your brain is constantly looking for messages to help you survive and thrive. When you have a problem that needs solving, your brain will automatically begin to look for solutions.

When you’re driving on the highway, how many of those billboards do you actually notice? Zero? How about when you’re hungry? All of a sudden, your brain has a problem. It needs food to survive. Now the billboards that once passed unnoticed start to stand out. ARBY’S. MCDONALDS. SUBWAY.

The key to crafting a quality message that cuts through the noise is in understanding the problem is your customer has and speaking directly and clearly to solving it.

When your customer wakes up in the middle of the night worried about their gutters being clogged with leaves, which ad will they remember? The one that says, “Dave’s gutter cleaning service has been in operation for 100 years,” or “Dave will get the leaves out of your gutters so you can get some sleep.”

The better you understand your customer’s problem, and the better you can speak to solving it, the more likely they are to remember you, call you, and buy your solution.

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Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash