The psychology behind why people don't like ads (and how to make better ads) (2023)

FAQs

Why people don't like advertisement? ›

Ads feel like an invasion of privacy

The truth is, as humans, we don't like to feel like our behavior is being tracked and analyzed, even if it is common practice these days thanks to digital marketing.

The psychology of advertising focuses on building empathy towards a product or service to help you become more inclined to buy or use it. Research from 2021 suggests that the physical aspects of the ads we see — including people, images, and even colors — can influence how we relate to the ad itself.

Some of the top reasons that ads can come across as annoying are: frequency of ads, placement on the webpage, lack of relevancy and bad targeting, and size of the ads. The steady increase of online adverts appearing across our favourite websites and social networks is certainly a grievance for online consumers.

Successful advertising rarely succeeds through argument or calls to action. Instead, it creates positive memories and feelings that influence our behavior over time to encourage us to buy something at a later date.

Ad fatigue

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.

We have become accustomed to tuning out advertising and marketing messages because we don't like interruptions in our habit-formed lives. And we're skeptical of the messages ads bring us. In fact, most of us feel ads don't bring much value to our lives, just more distraction. There's another reason we tune out ads.

What emotions are used in advertising? The most commonly-used emotion present in advertising is happiness. Positive advertisements are more likely to be shared than negative ones, due to people's desire to share content that makes them feel positive.

A good advertisement will: Grab the attention of viewers. Encourage them to take action. Outline the benefit of doing so.

Ads that tap into our emotional reaction to an issue, rather than just our rational or informational needs, are called “fear appeals.” They are named this way because they try to leverage our fear of an issue as a way to jump-start us into action.

What makes an ads so annoying? ›

#Reason 1: Interruption is disturbing

The ads that disrupt the flow of information a user gets are considered to be the most annoying ones by consumers. Actionable tips: When people are in a hurry to find something out, don't have time or patience to deal with your ads. Especially with the ones difficult to close.

What adverts often try to do, is make you feel bad about yourself by lowering your self-esteem in order to persuade you to buy that specific product which claims it will make you happier and a better person. The most common way they do this is by making you feel bad about your body image or how you look in general.

Ads that trigger sentiments do so using different themes. However, pride, love, achievement, man's empathy, friendships, loneliness or memories perform best. Emotional response to an advertisement, rather than the ad's actual content, produces great influence on the intent of a consumer to buy a product.

Advertising works by creating a pattern of associations that elicit an emotional connection or response in the intended audience, ultimately influencing the consumer's purchasing decisions, often in an unconscious way.

Even when good advertising makes us buy things that we don't need, they don't make us buy things we don't want. The concept of “good advertising makes us believe that something is better than actually is” doesn't have to do with buying things that we don't like just because we saw it on the internet.

Whatever the emotional connection, our data analysis has shown that ads with faces outperform ads without faces. However, throwing in a face or two is not the answer - it's the face on its own that makes the difference. Why? Once again, it's the influence of entropy at work.

Immunity to marketing is a myth.

Attention is a finite resource. On average, people are exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day. The average human brain is simply incapable of processing such a bombardment of content, which means the vast majority of ads seen are only ignored or forgotten about within seconds.

Headline. If you want to generate a measurable response to your Web page or ad, you MUST have a headline. An ad with just photos, words, videos, or illustrations may impress people and it may get their attention, but it will not generate actual measurable response without a headline.

Is advertising a waste of money do you agree? ›

Advertising, like all marketing initiatives can be extremely effective, but can also potentially be a waste of money. In order to determine if advertising is right for you, you need to ask yourself if you have a brand strong enough to compensate for the lack of public messaging.

Here are five marketing psychology principles — social proof, scarcity, loss aversion, anchoring bias, and reciprocity — and how they can work for you.

The 7 Ps of Marketing

These seven are: product, price, promotion, place, packaging, positioning and people. As products, markets, customers and needs change rapidly, you must continually revisit these seven Ps to make sure you're on track and achieving the maximum results possible for you in today's marketplace.

(Marketing mix explained) The four Ps are product, price, place, and promotion. They are an example of a “marketing mix,” or the combined tools and methodologies used by marketers to achieve their marketing objectives.

Bill Bernbach said: "The most powerful Element in advertising is the truth.” The more truthful an advertisement is the more consumers respond and the high the sales. Any advertisement based on lies can never survive for long. Telling lies to your consumers about a product will break their trust and confidence.

Emotional advertising isn't merely images and slogans that try to educate and persuade viewers. They strategically manipulate consumers' feelings and stimulate the emotional triggers that influence how we make decisions.

The best ad campaigns are often the ones that clearly articulate the brand value to their audience, either intrinsically or extrinsically. People don't want to work hard to figure out what you're trying to tell them. So, ensure that you clearly communicate your message and that it doesn't lead to confusion.

What is the psychology of fear in ads? ›

Fear appeal in advertising is a strategy used that provides the audience with a persuasive message that emphasizes a serious threat or harm that might come to them if they do not do what is asked of them in the advertisement.

"Fear appeals strike a nerve with people who have doubts about things or do not know about things," he explains. "They play on our inherent fears of the unknown or that something is going to kill us. This is why scare tactics are stunningly effective."

Fear-based marketing leverages Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Instead of using positive statements to make customers feel like they're going to fill a need with their purchase, the fear statements motivate by making the customers feel like they're missing something.

Commercials are annoying and very few of them are even interesting. However, despite what you may think, they are very effective. With an understanding of how the brain and memory works, commercials are able to make you remember their products, services, and ideologies without you even doing much conscious work.

The manipulative advertising intends to do that by using facts, arguments and plying with consumers emotions in a misleading and deceptive manner. The most claims used in manipulation through advertising are the exaggeration of the quality of product, fallacious arguments and emotional appeals. Exaggeration of quality.

The advertiser's intentions are to try to get into your mind and influence your thoughts and decisions. Advertisements like the car, insurance, medicine, beverage, and political commercials often try to influence the consumer. Advertising is harmful to society because of its strong influence.

Advertisers use persuasive techniques such as appeals to emotion, peer pressure, social proof, and repetition to convince customers to buy products or services.

Using images and sounds to appeal to your senses: sight, touch, taste, etc. Promoting a special ingredient may make you think the product works better than others. Featuring someone, like a celebrity, saying how the product worked for them can be convincing.

What emotions do advertisements appeal to? ›

Targeted advertisements rely on data already collected about customers, using demographics, interest, and behavior trends to approach consumers the way they prefer to be engaged. Leveraging customer data takes the guesswork out of customer acquisition and reduces spending on users who are unlikely to convert.

Advertising uses a variety of techniques to influence audience behavior. It may have a celebrity endorse a product or make fun of a competitor. It could evoke a sense of urgency to make you buy a product before it runs out. It could also play on your emotions by showing you a sad story with a happy ending.

If people are clicking on your ads and not converting, there could be problems with your website or landing page that run deeper than your ad copy. Issues could arise from: Inconsistent messaging. Poor UX and loading times.

According to HubSpot Research, 91% of people believe ads are more intrusive now compared to two or three years ago, and 79% believe they're being tracked by retargeted ads. So, it's not hard to imagine why people are pretty ad-averse these days.

People are more likely to buy from businesses when there is demonstrated proof that other individuals have made purchases and put trust in the company. By simply providing target audiences with reviews or testimonials, advertisers are taking advantage of this psychological principle.

Advertising frequently uses psychological pressure (for example, appealing to feelings of inadequacy) on the intended consumer, which may be harmful. As a result of these criticisms, the advertising industry has seen low approval rates in surveys and negative cultural portrayals.

Previous studies found that perceived goal impediment, perceived ad clutter, and prior negative experience are positively associated with advertising avoidance on the Internet [31].

What are 3 disadvantages of advertising? ›

Word-of-mouth advertising is considered the most effective form. It has the desired qualities of strong credibility, high audience attention levels, and friendly audience reception.

Advertising is evil when it leads to a deal that is biased towards one party. But if done for a good cause, advertising is really helpful. In the end, here is what you have to remember: Most people are looking for the right products or services.

Yes, it can be harmful. But it can also be extremely beneficial to society. Advertising is an incredibly effective and powerful way to spread the word about important issues and products, such as AIDS awareness, diabetes monitors, tobacco and alcohol risks, and other health-related concerns.

The ads that disrupt the flow of information a user gets are considered to be the most annoying ones by consumers. Actionable tips: When people are in a hurry to find something out, don't have time or patience to deal with your ads. Especially with the ones difficult to close.

Our analysis shows that if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That's about half the drop in life satisfaction you'd see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you'd see in someone who'd become unemployed.