Perhaps unsurprisingly, advertising is a contributing factor. New research from Aprimo found that 58% of consumers say the onslaught of holiday marketing stresses them out – countdowns to the number of shopping days left until Christmas, or reminders that post-Thanksgiving deals are fleeting, can understandably induce anxiety.

“People notice a huge surge in marketing content around the holidays, and this is a double-edged sword,” Aprimo CEO Erik Huddleston explained. “It drives people to find deals and make more purchases, but brands also run the risk of overdoing it and turning people off, leading to consumers unsubscribing from email lists or developing a negative impression of a brand.”

Or, as Intermark Group CEO Jake McKenzie wrote in Adweek, “Extreme periods of stress change how we think — we begin to process information as if we are in a state of fear.”

That role of stress as a factor in advertising and its effectiveness is a curious one. “Stress spending” – making impulse purchases to alleviate stress or anxiety – is a well known phenomenon, with 52% of respondents to a survey saying they’ve partaken in the practice, and that number goes up to 68% for millennials. But it’s not a successful shortcut to customer loyalty or advocacy in our post-omnichannel world. The same survey says that 83% of stress spenders have regretted their impulse spending. You’re not going to make a repeat purchase if you’re regretful or embarrassed – much less tell your friends and family about it.

Plus, research from Yahoo in 2017 found that advertising can be 40% more effective when it reaches consumers who are in a good mood. So here’s a question for marketers: How much more effective could your advertising be if it aimed to truly alleviate consumer stress, rather than elevate it or provide a quick fix?

At Infillion, we have some ideas.

Harvard Business Review said it bluntly in 2020: “Advertising makes us unhappy.” But the real problem is that consumers are seeing too many ads, and they’re too interruptive. Marketing Dive found that 52% of consumers say that if they see an ad too many times, it hurts their perception of the brand. And in the battle for scarce consumer attention, the American Marketing Association found, advertisers responded with louder and higher-energy TV commercials – which consumers didn’t like, especially when they were trying to chill out. In short, if consumers are only paying attention to an ad because they have no way of avoiding it, brands aren’t really earning that attention.

The Infillion solution: Getting the right kind of attention – the kind of attention that consumers consciously choose to provide – is key. Fine-tuned targeting, particularly with first-party data that users provide proactively, can ensure that your ads are reaching the right audience without needing to rely on the heavy frequency that can make already stressed-out consumers tune out. Plus, you can offer them the option to see fewer ads by opting into an interactive experience that maximizes brand lift in less time. (That’s what Infillion’s TrueX technology does.)

Content that lends a helping hand.

We’re bombarded with so many ads that it’s difficult to pay attention to them all. But – speaking of interaction – making a video ad interactive boosts the amount of time consumers spend with it by 47%, according to IPG Media Lab. Maybe that’s because interactivity can be fun (think branded Tetris-inspired games) but it can also help provide more information that’s actually helpful rather than just a sales message. Around the holidays, that can seal the deal.

Consider this: Rather than just reminding you that there are only so many days left until Thanksgiving, an interactive ad for a CPG food or beverage brand can help buyers out by offering recipes (if it’s on TV, an easy QR code snap can ensure viewers can access it later). A mobile rich media ad for a wine brand can offer a store locator for easier buying. Or, for indecisive shoppers, a product exploration or quiz can help them figure out what they’re really looking for. 

The Infillion solution: Making ads interactive can seem daunting, but Infillion’s Creative Studio offers Blueprints, a set of frameworks that can take a brand’s existing creative assets and turn them into any number of engaging interactive units, from quizzes to multi-video experiences, in a fraction of the usual turnaround time.

Making gifting easier.

While impulse shopping to alleviate stress isn’t great for creating customer loyalty, an easy path to purchase is perfect for last-minute gifts. After all, 56% of consumers say holiday gifting stresses them out. And stressed-out consumers can find it difficult to focus, which means that they might see an ad for a product that would make a great gift for one of their loved ones but then completely forget to search for it later. (Being bombarded with more and more ads for other products probably doesn’t help.) 

The Infillion solution: With shoppable ads like Infillion’s ShopX, viewers can add an item to a shopping cart at any number of retailers directly from the ad. Shoppable ads are also great for purchasing gift cards, which consistently rank among the most popular (and most desired) holiday gifts.

Media’s changing fast. So how will the decisions the industry makes now affect its future in a few years? A panel hosted by Infillion at Advertising Week New York, titled “The Road Map To Media’s Connected Future,” took on this topic head-on. Moderated by Andrew Dawson, Infillion VP, the panel concluded that humanity needs to be the focus for an AI-obsessed advertising industry.

After all, at the center of these rapid changes in media is the question of where it matters to “be a human.” That issue underpins every major debate in advertising right now, from the increasing digitization and automation of what were once human-driven processes to the global restructuring of what we consider to be “work” – and what work need to be done not just by humans but by humans working together in-person as opposed to virtually.

Dawson was joined by a group of agency leaders from across the media buying landscape: Leah Askew, SVP and head of Precision Media at Digitas; Jennifer Dass, chief transformation officer at Initiative; Amanda DeVito, chief marketing officer at Butler/Till; and Samantha Hoffmann, programmatic practice lead at Wavemaker US.

“I think you have to double down on the human side of our business from a leadership perspective – emotional intelligence, soft skills,” said Butler/Till’s Amanda DeVito. “I think [automation] is going to free us up to be more creative, to allow more collaboration.”

The importance of staying human.

Agencies are also learning that automating absolutely everything – including when it comes to programmatic buying – isn’t always the answer when it comes to maximizing results for clients. Rather, programmatic is a powerful part of a more comprehensive, holistic media strategy. “Ten years ago I was ruthlessly trying to educate everyone on programmatic, and trying to direct every dollar to programmatic,” Leah Askew of Digitas said. “For years that’s what I was pushing for – technology and consolidation – and now I’m meaningfully taking a step back and saying, maybe not. Let’s talk about attention. Let’s talk about quality.” In Askew’s opinion, that involves a combination of programmatic and direct buying, incorporated thoughtfully into a media plan. 

Samantha Hoffmann of Wavemaker noted that because the programmatic landscape has gotten so much more complicated, that ironically makes it need more human guidance. “There was an ease when we had just a couple of platforms, a couple of DSPs, a couple of ways to activate supply,” she said. “But now, to the point of fragmentation, or trying to solve for privacy concerns or data management concerns, we have to be more consultative at every single piece. That may mean that I’m recommending that something be bought in a non-programmatic way.”

“We definitely don’t want to take the human aspects out of the business,” Jennifer Dass said. “We have to be creative and strategic. That hero creative [in a campaign] should still be from a creative mind that is actually developing the brand voice.”

Sustainability enters the spotlight.

There’s an unexpected upside to being able to lean on programmatic buying and other AI where it’s most effective: That means more time to focus on more “human” aspects of the business that may have been a “nice-to-have” at one point, but which now are imperatives.

One of those is sustainability. The energy consumption of an increasingly automated and AI-driven advertising industry, from water use to the strain on the electricity grid, has come under increasing scrutiny. And it’s a problem that humans have to solve, well, as humans.

“We have an entire sustainability practice,” Jennifer Dass said of Initiative’s business. “A lot of our clients hold us accountable to sustainability, and those metrics, and being environmentally friendly.”

From Amanda DeVito’s perspective, this isn’t just a sustainability imperative, it’s an advantage. Butler/Till, an independent and employee-owned agency, is a certified B-Corp. In a complex advertising world, this is a selling point for their business. It also holds them to a high standard.

“When we talk about our media partners and our technology partners, we have to talk about what their environmental practices are,” she explained. “We talk about supply path. We even talk about compressing images in display.”

Looking at company culture.

The overall culture of an agency, and its levels of employee engagement, can also have serious implications for its success in an era of rapid change. It’s an awkward time for this in advertising, considering that COVID-era work-from-home policies are ending and many agencies want employees back in the office in-person. Employees, in some cases, have pushed back.

“It’s not natural to be back in the office,” Samantha Hoffmann said of the post-COVID era, emphasizing that the workplace in addition to the business has to center humanity and give employees a reason to understand why human interaction matters. “You have to go above and beyond to create – whether it’s team outings, or trainings away from their desks – you end up getting better value out for the clients and the business you’re going to drive.”

“It’s a change. Everybody’s going through it,” Leah Askew said. “This is a relationships business. We are deeply connected to the market. I think being together drives creativity, but also fostering togetherness with all our partners is so important.”

“Bringing your authentic, whole, happy self to work really does make a difference,” Jennifer Dass concluded.

Want to learn more about being at the forefront of advertising, retail, and shopping trends? Follow Infillion on LinkedIn for our latest research and insights.

The media business is changing fast – and it might not seem obvious that a grocery store brand originally founded in 1939 would be seen as one of the industry’s biggest innovators. But that’s exactly what the Boise, ID-headquartered Albertsons is doing with its two-year-old Albertsons Media Collective. Albertsons, the parent company of regional grocery chains like Safeway, Shaw’s, and Vons in addition to its eponymous stores, has become one of the most-talked-about names in retail media – and with over 2,000 stores and 30 million weekly customers, it certainly brings scale to the table.

But how does a legacy retail company become a pioneer in a new sector of advertising? Through a commitment to values, high standards, and putting the customer first. At Advertising Week New York, Infillion CMO Laurel Rossi sat down for a fireside chat with Michelle Weiskittel, senior director of retail media network media, creative, and operations at Albertsons Media Collective to discuss just that.

“We’re a late mover in the retail media space,” Weiskittel explained, citing that Albertsons was not a digitally native retailer – and that she sees that as an advantage because it could build new digital systems and datasets rather than needing to adapt existing ones. “We really want to take advantage of that late move and build solutions that work for everyone. We can use our voice in that process and build something that takes advantage of where we are now in the digital ecosystem versus where we were.”

That ability to build agile, future-forward systems is key when one of the biggest challenges in the world of retail media networks (RMNs) is standardization. “We know RMNs are an important media vehicle in the space, but there are a lot of them, and in order to make that efficient for the buyers you have to think about standardization,” Weiskittel said. “If everyone’s measuring differently then…let’s have the conversation together and focus on standardization and transparency.”

On that note of transparency, Weiskittel emphasized that it’s a key value for Albertsons Media Collective in dealing both with their customers as well as the consumers who shop at their stores. After all, grocery stores are some of the most hyperlocal businesses out there, and shoppers want to know that their data is being respected. “Grocery is a localized experience in itself, so we have to pull all of that together and really think about the customer and what the customer is going to react to,” she said.

That deeply personal relationship that consumers have with their local grocery store also underpins Albertsons’ commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Food is the center of most people’s lives,” Weiskittel said. “Our shoppers are diverse. If we don’t carry that through in our strategies, then that’s a miss and we’re not relating back to our shoppers and our customers.” That extends to the internal culture at Albertsons Media Collective, where leadership hosts “listening sessions” with employees about events and issues both inside and outside the company, and where mentoring is a central part of the employee experience.

Michelle Weiskittel and Laurel Rossi were sharing the stage as part of Advertising Week’s “Future is Female” track, which celebrates trailblazing women within the advertising industry. That’s especially key for the retail sector. As Rossi underscored in their fireside chat, women are responsible for 80% of household purchases – and that rises to 93% for food purchases. Recognizing and centering this is what helps a nearly century-old brand like Albertsons continue to be a mover and shaker as the industry evolves both in terms of tech innovation and on a cultural inclusion front.

“When you’ve been in this industry so long, like us, you’re motivated by the change and the desire to push yourself forward,” Weiskittel said. “What keeps me going is that constant rate of change.”

Want to learn more about being at the forefront of advertising, retail, and shopping trends? Follow Infillion on LinkedIn for our latest research and insights.

In 2020, in the middle of the strictest COVID-19 lockdowns, Home Depot unveiled a particularly unusual new product: a Halloween lawn ornament in the form of a 12-foot-tall skeleton with glowing eyes. While the product had been in development since pre-COVID, its irreverence and absurdity made it a runaway hit in an otherwise serious and stressful year. Three years later, the product fans have nicknamed “Skelly” continues to sell out.

Since its debut, “Skelly” – and Home Depot’s broader portfolio of outlandish Halloween decorations – have fascinated the marketing world. What does a brand best known for a practical selection of home and garden fixtures gain by selling a skeleton so enormous that it can peek into second-story windows?

The answer: The giant skeleton gets the right kind of hard-to-capture attention, and Home Depot backs that attention up with a savvy strategy to keep it while respecting consumers’ time. And marketers can learn from this success, whether it’s “spooky season” or not. Here are a few of the key lessons.

Don’t exploit consumers’ attention with overexposure.

One key tactic that Home Depot has maintained for the four years since it debuted the 12-foot-tall skeleton is that it doesn’t manufacture – or sell – very many of them. The company has intentionally kept quantities limited, even when it likely knows it could sell far more. As a result, “Skelly” still sells out in minutes whenever its inventory is refreshed, including when it’s nowhere near October, and even with buyers’ purchases limited to just one skeleton.

There’s an important lesson here when it comes to human attention. Imagine if, when you drove to work in the month of October, every third house on the drive had a 12-foot-tall skeleton on its lawn. You’d probably find that irritating, and likely quite disruptive to your attention. It might even give you a negative brand perception of the company responsible for selling so many skeletons. Instead, with “Skelly” sales kept scarce, seeing one in a neighbor’s lawn or along your work commute is a fun, attention-grabbing novelty.

Along the same lines, seeing an ad too many times can make consumers less likely to purchase the item. Attention is the core of marketing, but marketers need to make sure they don’t exploit it once they have it.

Know when and how to stay current.

Many people, including many advertising professionals, are surprised to hear that Home Depot has never put any paid advertising spend behind its Halloween decorations. Instead, the company works with Trade School, a digital agency based in its hometown of Atlanta, to create content for platforms like Instagram and TikTok that can be ultra-relevant at any time of the year. In July, for example, the company tapped into the fan and brand mania surrounding the Barbie movie by putting one of its skeletons into Barbie’s iconic packaging.

This kind of flexible creative strategy allows Home Depot to easily adapt “Skelly” messaging to tap into current trends and social media conversations in a way that’s able to be far more relevant than traditional paid planning would allow. It’s also helped Home Depot cement the skeleton as a year-round cult favorite at the company rather than a seasonal decoration.

But paid media can now take advantage of this, too. New ad formats, next-generation targeting, AI-driven real-time campaign insights, and dynamic creative can bring digital advertising into the realm of up-to-the-minute relevance. That way, brands can ensure they aren’t just part of a conversation, but part of the right conversation. (Don’t believe us? Drop us a line at Infillion.)

Know how to turn attention into a purchase – even if it’s not a direct one.

The 12-foot-tall skeleton is great at turning heads, but not only is it kept in intentionally scarce quantities, it’s also expensive – priced at $300, and even more on the secondary market. Plus, you need somewhere to put it, which rules out most apartment dwellers. In other words, there are a lot of people who might love to have an enormous skeleton to display every Halloween, but they aren’t customers for one reason or another. For this reason, Home Depot carefully positions “Skelly” as part of a broader curation of Halloween decor, much of which is far less pricey. This year, its “Boo on a Budget” rundown offers ideas for how to create a whole spooky porch display using Home Depot products for under $100.

The lesson for marketers here is that when you capture someone’s attention (and the skeleton certainly does), not everyone whose attention gets grabbed is going to instantly become a buyer. For advertisers, offering interactive creative with product explorations can give them a look at a brand’s products beyond the most eye-catching “shiny objects.”

Creating brand advocates is the most powerful form of marketing.

With no paid advertising spend, Home Depot lets “Skelly” speak for itself – or rather, it lets Skelly’s fans do the talking. When it comes to a brand’s back-end strategy, attention to detail and relevance is key – but when it comes to what consumers see directly from a brand, often less is more. 

The skeleton’s runaway success has led to a cult following of skeleton fans; there’s even a sizable cadre of giant skeleton owners who keep them up year-round, often dressing them up in costumes for Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, the Super Bowl, and more. But Home Depot’s never released any accessories for “Skelly,” instead letting fans take the lead and show off their creativity. Hearing from a brand is one thing; hearing from that brand’s fans is another. Infillion’s recent research about the changing customer journey, in which shopping is an always-on state for today’s consumers, underscores this. Buying a product is no longer the end of the customer journey; becoming an advocate for it and influencing others takes that journey one step further.

The bonus: The zany subculture around “Skelly” gets consumers more invested in the Home Depot brand and makes them feel like they can be a part of it. Whether that translates to more kitchen backsplash, vinyl flooring, and weed whacker purchases during the rest of the year remains to be seen – but it certainly can’t hurt.

Spooky season may end in November, but Infillion’s takes on what’s new and what’s next in marketing are year-round. Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest.

This month on the Infillion blog, our team is exploring the concept of attention – something that the advertising industry is constantly talking about, that we all agree is important, and yet we’re still struggling to capture. Throughout October, we’ll be sharing creative deep-dives, research and insights, and future-forward strategies for maximizing consumer attention, so make sure you follow us on LinkedIn to know when the next post drops.

We’re starting off by sharing some of the insights that get our team thinking – some fresh knowledge about attention and advertising. Here are five facts that have hooked us lately.

1. A lot more ads are trying to get our attention than we think.

“How many ads do you think you see each day?” is a fun question we at Infillion like to ask our clients and partners. As it turns out, we’re exposed to anywhere between 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day according to clinical tests. Ron Marshall, founder of agency Red Crow Marketing, wrote that he thought the number sounded ridiculous but then started actually counting ads one day – and admitted he had counted almost 500 brand messages before he’d even finished eating breakfast.

Like Marshall, most of us probably don’t think we see that many ads. That’s because we’ve become accustomed to tuning them out. Our attention is scarce, and a lot of brands are competing for it.

2. Interactivity can help marketers keep consumers’ attention for longer.

In a study from IPG Media Lab, MAGNA, and Yahoo found that consumers spend 49% more time with an online ad when it has interactive components. Whether they’re already familiar with a brand or not, interactivity in the form of anything from a product carousel to a quiz can get consumers to stick around for considerably longer with an ad, maximizing their ability to learn about the brand and start considering a purchase.

But effective interactive ads need clear calls to action to pull in that coveted attention. Here’s why: The same study found that among consumers who opted to not interact with an interactive ad, the majority – 54% – said it’s because they simply didn’t know the ad was interactive.

3. Realizing that attention is scarce – and adapting to it – can help drive profits.

Research from Cornell revealed that if a retailer incorporates one-click checkout, that consumers increase their spending at that retailer by an average of 28.5%. In other words, shortening the path to purchase takes advantage of fleeting consumer attention by ensuring that the consumer doesn’t get distracted by something else before making a purchase.

This underscores the effectiveness of shoppable ads like Infillion’s ShopX, where add-to-cart features directly within ad creative can shorten the path to purchase.

4. Playing a game can keep consumers’ attention for longer.

“Gamification” has been a marketing tactic (and buzzword) ever since geolocation “check-in” apps like Foursquare and Gowalla became brand favorites back in the late 2000s. But the idea of earning and being rewarded goes back much further in the world of marketing. Think about just how competitive frequent flyers get about miles, branded credit cards, and status tiers. That’s because when gamification is done well, it works – the natural human impulse to compete is a strong one. Even in unexpected sectors like the HR department at work. Research from eLearning Industry shows that when companies effectively incorporate gamification into their employee training and engagement processes, employee engagement increases by 60% and motivation by 83%.

This extends to ads, too. When Infillion built an interactive streaming video ad for Kraft’s Lunchables brand – which you can hear more about in our eMarketer Tech Talk from earlier this year – viewers didn’t just complete the game. The average user played it twice.

5. Repetitive ads might get attention – but not in a good way.

Research has found that a consumer who sees the same ad between six and ten times is 4.5% less likely to purchase the product in that ad than a consumer who sees it between two and five times. In other news, yes, that ad got their attention. But that attention quickly turned negative when they saw it too many times.

Here, again, is where interactivity can be the solution. As we shared above, consumers spend 49% more time with interactive ads than with standard video ads. They also like a clear path to purchase, and maybe even some fun and playful twists in that interactivity. With an “advertise smarter, not harder” approach, brands can seize upon those elusive pockets of attention – and make a real difference in a consumer’s path to purchase.

Want to learn the secrets to maximizing attention within an ad? Infillion’s Creative Studio is ready to share. Check out Infillion’s Creative Showcase here, and reach out to us to set up a meeting!