Tips for developing brainwashing advertising skills!

The dissemination and production of brainwash advertisements is a vicious circle. People who hate brainwash advertisements are more likely to see them. Their boycott will generate social heat, thus promoting the commercial closed loop of brainwash advertisements.

Last year's World Cup started a big discussion in the industry about brainwashing advertisements. From the World Cup BOSS Direct Recruitment, Zhihu, Mafengwo, to the later Platinum Travel Photography, SoYoung, and to Cadillac and Yiche.com in the past two days, brainwashing advertisements have been repeatedly complained about, but the brands have tried them time and time again and they have never failed.

The existence of brainwashing advertisements is reasonable. We have also evaluated brainwashing advertisements in detail in previous articles. Let us just talk about them briefly today.

Behind brainwashing ads is the shortage of traffic and attention. The commercial effect of advertising creativity is gradually failing, because creativity usually requires storytelling, but users do not have much patience to put themselves into the story scenario, so simply and directly expressing the interest points is an efficient way to trigger.

Of course, we have always believed that brainwash advertising will become the "new normal" for quite some time in the future.

Users’ shorter attention spans mean more marketing noise , and the brand’s complete message needs to be conveyed to users more quickly and in a shorter time. In other words: if the brand selling point can be clearly stated in one sentence, don’t beat around the bush or tell stories to express it.

Two major motivations behind brainwashing advertisements

There are at least two reasons behind brainwashing advertising:

The first is that brand interception is more common

Information explosion and media fragmentation have made users’ decision-making paths confusing . Users will not proceed linearly according to the traditional steps of “knowing-familiarizing-trusting-purchasing-sharing”. Every gap in the link will provide other brands with opportunities to promote and enter.

In addition, users will also search for information and compare it repeatedly on their own, making consumption decisions more complex and random.

Therefore, no matter what kind of marketing promotion you do, you must try to be as "short, flat and fast" as possible, and build an information and conversion loop in a shorter dissemination time, otherwise it will be easy for other brands to take advantage of you.

Many people may have discovered that even in online communications, video ads have been getting shorter and shorter. The previous 10-second and 15-second ads have now become 7 seconds, 5 seconds (or even 3 seconds), and then packaged into a large collection and released.

Second, users are more rational.

That’s right, users are becoming more rational in that they are less likely to be disturbed by emotional or creative expressions, and the effectiveness of creativity is declining .

We have written in previous articles that the popularization of information driven by channels such as KOLs has made users more hardcore and professional , especially on grass-growing platforms such as Xiaohongshu, where ingredient parties and parameter parties have become very common. For these increasingly professional users, no matter how many creative ideas there are, they are not as good as solid products.

We believe that this year's only nationwide screen-sweeping advertisement, "What's Peppa?", did not actually bring much box office revenue to the movie "Peppa Pig Celebrates Chinese New Year", but instead made the director famous.

If Pechoin's "one-shot" hit pictures and texts in the early years could still bring brand exposure, for products with short sales life cycles such as movies, it would be fatal if the commercials did not bring obvious box office conversions.

Brands are confident

The controversy surrounding brainwashing ads naturally lies in their vulgar aesthetics, but the repeated appearance of vulgar ads also reflects a rather sad conclusion, that is, China has a vast territory and uneven aesthetic levels, and most of the brand's target users will not pay for aesthetics or creativity.

Those who are favored are fearless. Many people say they will uninstall and block vulgar advertisements after seeing them, but when they actually use them, they will reinstall them. This is the universal "law of true fragrance" .

Brand favorability evaluation is more effective in mature markets and for standard products because the cost of brand switching for users is not high. If you don’t like Coca-Cola, you can choose Pepsi.

However, owners of crude advertising brands often have unique product advantages, or are in a stage of seizing a position, and the industry market is not mature, so they have reason to overdraw brand favorability in order to seize the market.

In addition, don’t think that brainwashing ads are easy to make. According to our observations, the creation of brainwashing ads requires a certain level of skills and support from relevant methodologies . Not everyone who makes brainwashing ads can spark discussion.

Just imagine, if you were in charge of Hengyuanxiang’s brand marketing back then, could you have come up with something like the “Twelve Zodiac Signs Advertisement”? (This is hard to think of, even though it may seem silly)

Brainwashing ads are always in elevators

Most brainwashing ads come from elevators, because elevator ads are compulsive and can passively gather people from all buildings (this won’t work if there are advertising spaces in office building toilets). Even if you are playing on your phone, the advertising slogans will help you be brainwashed. This method of detonation has been proven to be effective. Moreover, it is not convenient to play with your phone during peak hours when there are many people, so the advertising reach is very efficient.

Nowadays, the information in elevator advertisements is becoming increasingly diluted. We can find that the advertising spaces in elevators are increasing, the effect of frames is decreasing, and the importance of television is increasing.

Therefore, the most important thing for brainwash advertising in elevators is to have a short and magical slogan and music, and it must be able to be played within the shortest elevator ride time (that is, the time to open and close the doors + the time to move one floor, 15 seconds is enough).

However, the elevator advertising business is not sinking very fast, because even if it sinks to the low-tier market, there must be enough matching advertisers to support the sales business. Therefore, elevator advertising is basically used to attract white-collar workers in first- and second-tier cities, and first- and second-tier white-collar workers are more likely to form large-scale topic discussions, so brainwashing advertising is to be seen by the group that least wants to see it.

This has created a paradoxical phenomenon: the more people clamor for a boycott of brainwash ads, the more likely they are to see brainwash ads; it is precisely because of their boycott that social media heat is generated, thus promoting the commercial closed loop of brainwash ads.

Author: Zheng Zhuoran

Source: Spread Gymnastics (ID: chuanboticao)