The 3 Magic Reasons Why People Don't Skip Advertising

A generalized trend every marketer should be aware of these days is how consumers skip advertising. The river flows downstream, the hot air rises from the ground, and viewers will avoid ads. It’s the new normal in Adlandia. Please don’t ignore the majority. But sometimes, people decide to watch, engage, and be entertained. Why is it so?

Last week, I wrote a mini-successful piece on why people skip advertising, which was successful relative to my young blog standards. An intriguing comment received on LinkedIn challenged me to write about the opposite and interesting behavior: why people DON’T skip ads.

Here are 3 reasons why:

Because you’ve entertained them – advertising always claimed to be a form of entertainment, but this positioning might be more relevant today. We want to run away from the neverending news cycle, the worries, and the anxiety of the times. We want a quick snack of fun. But we don’t have hours anymore. In the past, we could dedicate a full evening of uninterrupted viewing to a movie. Today we’ve replaced that undivided attention with a split between our streaming and social media platforms. How powerful is the following example of a 6-second ad. There is almost zero need to mention the cause of advertising.

Because you’ve elicited emotions, preferably positive ones – we love a good story, and examples of good stories delivered in 6 seconds or less exist (anyone thinking about Print or Out of Home here?). In Online Video, I have a fabulous example from our brand Sheba. Does it not leave a smile on your face?

Because they are not in front of the screen anymore – I know, it’s an inconvenient truth. People don’t necessarily skip advertising by clicking the skip button; they can move their eyes and attention in a different direction: to another device, another person, or anywhere else than your wonderful creation.

It is not an omnipresent behavior but a growing one, fueled by our craving to dedicate our energy to multiple screen devices simultaneously.