Short answer? More positive than you think.
“Free-to-use” sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube profit from their platforms’ ability to influence users with advertisements in exchange for being sources of endless entertainment for its users and giving its users the power to connect with millions of people globally.
These sites, however, when they started to become popular in the late 2000s, their users were not used to seeing advertisements online and thus when the ads finally came pouring as these sites became more popular, the majority of internet users did not appreciate it. It is, of course, very important for an advertising campaign to be seen positively by its audience if it wants to influence them to drive sales for their promoted brands.
Fast forward to 2020 when the digital natives (Millennials, Gen Z) have overtaken the older generations as the biggest internet users. More and more internet users have grown up with digital ads as a normal part of their digital experience, very much like how commercials/ads are normally seen on TV. Nowadays, digital ads are perceived differently, and are now much more influential than they were in the previous decade, even influencing election results.
Now what does this setup look like in the Indonesian digital market?
Sentiment Towards Digital Advertising
According to a Snapcart survey on online habits of Indonesian shoppers, surprisingly, only 13% have expressed dislike with the wish to remove digital ads from their favorite website’s feed.
More than half of users (52%) expressed either tolerance or indifference towards digital ads accepting it as a normal part of “free” digital experience.
On the more positive sentiments for digital ads, a significant portion of users (34%) actually like digital ads for reasons of:
1) being actually entertained by the ads (19%)
2) being referred to products they were actually interested in purchasing (15%)
In fact, 34% likability is huge compared to our initial hypothesis that almost all internet users would rather not be exposed to digital ads.
Digital Advertising Effectiveness
In terms of effectiveness, digital advertisements have been able to influence around 76% of Indonesian internet users to try purchasing items, online or offline, at least once, after being exposed to an online ad.
This finding is promising for brands with scheduled digital advertising campaigns especially if coupled with the fact that significantly more people are being online now because of the lockdown. According to the aforementioned Snapcart survey, 77% of Indonesian internet users claim to spend more time online now due to Covid-19’s impact on Indonesians’ daily activities.
Recommendation
Remember the 15% of internet users who actually liked the online ads they saw on their feed because it suggested products that were interesting to them?
Wouldn’t it be a great formula for a digital campaign’s success if, alongside the high digital attention these days and the high trial rate for products seen in digital ads, we can focus our digital marketing spend to target the people who liked ads because the products featured are interesting to them?
This can be done by targeting users based on their internet browsing activity to measure interest for categories with high tendency to be researched on first on the web before purchase such as tech products, travel tickets, beauty products, and home appliances.
And for more commonly bought categories, which do not have as many online activities to detect interest for them, this can be done via targeting users based on their purchase data and profile.
For example, here in Snapcart with our product OPTI, we provide a “seed audience” that matches a campaign’s criteria on purchase history and demographics which then gets thousands of lookalikes to which the ad campaign will be directed to.
Would you like to see the findings of this study specifically for your industry or category?
References:
https://wistia.com/learn/marketing/the-psychology-behind-why-people-dislike-ads
