Why we turn your ads down

Most of what goes wrong in an advertising campaign has nothing to do with the platform it ran on.

People ask me what goes wrong with geofencing, or with paid search, or with display. Almost none of it is about the mechanism. The mechanism usually works. Draw the fence in the right place, set the campaign up properly, and the technical part does its job.

What goes wrong is that nobody knew who they were talking to.

The fence is the easy part

I say this about geofencing but it’s true of everything. The targeting is the easy part. Any competent operator can put your ad in front of a defined group of people.

The hard part is knowing what to say to them once you get there.

Not knowing the customer. Not knowing the brand well enough to sound like it. Not knowing what actually moves that person. What they want, what they’re worried about, what would make them stop scrolling on a Tuesday night.

That’s where campaigns die. Not in the setup.

So we do the boring part first

Before anybody draws a boundary anywhere, we do an assessment and build out customer profiles. Who is this business actually for. What do those people care about. What are they afraid of getting wrong. What would make them pick up the phone.

And here’s something worth knowing: those profiles aren’t just for the ads. They’re genuinely useful for the staff. For how the phone gets answered. For what goes on the website, what the invoices say, what somebody tells a customer standing in the shop. It’s one of the more valuable things a small business can have written down, and most of them don’t have it.

But for advertising it’s not optional, because everything you learn there has to show up in the creative.

Subtly, though. Not “we know you fly fish.” Nobody wants that. Just an image and a few words that feel like they were made for that person, so they recognize themselves in it without having to think about why.

Get that wrong and the best targeting in the world delivers a beautifully aimed ad that nobody cares about.

And then we turn the volume down

Here’s something my agency will never do: bombard people.

These platforms will happily serve your ad over and over and over inside a five-minute window if you let them. A lot of folks out there let them, because it burns through the budget and it looks like activity. It isn’t. It’s spending a client’s money to annoy strangers.

Think about how you feel when it happens to you. Same ad, fourth time, ten minutes. You don’t think better of that company. You think worse of them. And now they’ve paid for the privilege of you thinking worse of them.

So we turn it down. Way down.

Somebody standing in a fly fishing shop should see something beautiful once, maybe twice, and go on with their afternoon. That’s enough. That’s how you get remembered instead of resented.

Why this costs you less, not more

Owners sometimes assume that turning frequency down means giving something up. It’s the opposite.

Every impression past the point of usefulness is money spent making somebody like you less. You’re paying twice. Once for the ad, and again in goodwill you’ll never see on a report. Running lean means the budget goes further and nobody gets sick of you.

That’s not restraint for its own sake. That’s just not wasting your money.

What I’d want you to take from this

Subtlety rules. It rules in the creative and it rules in the frequency.

If you’re evaluating somebody to run your advertising, the questions worth asking aren’t about platforms and targeting options. Ask them who your customer is. Ask what that person wants. Ask how often your ad will be shown to the same human being in an hour.

The answers will tell you a lot.

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If you’re a Chicagoland business owner and nobody has ever asked you those questions, that’s worth fifteen minutes of conversation.