If you work in marketing you convince yourself that everyone is looking at your brand and company, yet the reality couldn't be further from the truth.

This is because pre-Covid people were bombarded with brand messages (adverts) of circa 4k -10k per day across multiple devices.

Real-time bidding (RTB) is the ad tech equivalent of Wall Street — where advertisers and publishers are matched up to buy and sell ad impressions, respectively. An “ad opportunity” is created when a web page is loaded (e.g. when a user visits the page).

That opportunity is put up for auction by sending a bid request to an ad exchange. Multiple buyers bid on that opportunity and the winner of that auction gets the right to serve an ad into that ad slot on the seller’s webpage. 

All of this takes place in a matter of milliseconds; and an estimated 10 trillion such auctions happen every week (equivalent of 10 – 20 million per second). When a bid is won, a call is made to the buyers’ ad server to serve the ad into the ad slot. (link to article here)

What's happened is that we've all started to disengage with the corporate (advertising) message.

Basically the level of trust has been diluted which in turn means we no longer relate to, or trust what you're saying is true.

To quote former Unilever CMO Keith Weed, “A brand without trust is just a product, and advertising without trust is just noise.” Consumers have always been mistrusting of advertising and brands -- that’s their default position.

The days of trying to 'buy' attention is well and truly over. But volume isn’t the only problem, as ads are becoming ever more intrusive, inescapable and noisy due to advances in technology and data science. 

People are constantly bombarded with digital junk, triggering ad fatigue and banner blindness. Everywhere we go, we’re greeted by unwarranted ads -- tags and cookies follow us from place to place -- insisting we buy things we’ve already bought or have no intention of buying.

Marketing transformation has more to do with a better understanding around how your potential customers are wanting to access information about your product and company in a way that doesn't include risking your cold spammy phone calls and e-mails, it's certainly not just about 'software' that will probably change very little, just like that last 'software' initiative your company embarked upon.

Today's socially savvy prospects and customers are checking out your 'social proof', not your website.

With your buyer looking for a solution to their problem, you need to supply them with relevant content, engage with them, and get 'listening'. 

The content needs to be informational and in the form of stories that are helpful rather than sales driven. 

Decision makers greatly prefer to get information from articles versus advertisers, with 80% saying as much in a survey from the Content Marketing Institute.

In addition to a changing customer, brands have to also deal with a more competitive landscape. It’s likely that all of your competitors are implementing new digital initiatives and trying to take advantage of technology. It’s not a matter of if you’ll transform, it’s when—and that when is now.