Do ads really ever “wear out”?

Like, do people get tired of them & then they get less effective?

Analytic Partners has just put a heaping mound of data on this question. They looked at the effectiveness of over 50,000 ads in 2020 to see if their impact was wearing out.

They found that 14 of them — FOURTEEN — showed signs of wearing out.

That’s 1 in 3600. That’s 0.03%. In other words, 99.97% of ads were going strong, doing fine, and didn’t need to be replaced.

Where does the wear-out myth come from? Two things, really:

1. Once in a while, there’s an ad YOU see waaaay too much of. So you think showing an ad too often makes people dislike the brand. This is using bad data to jump to a bad conclusion.

2. As marketers, we see our own ads alllll the time. We know every detail, every actor, every prop & line. So WE get tired of them. 

Meanwhile, normal people MAYBE have seen them once. While talking to their kids/friends/spouse about their dog/Xbox/appointment.

Caveats of course. But this is yet more evidence that your problem with ads is more likely to be wear-IN than wear-OUT .

LESSIONS:

🍊 Assume your ads are not wearing out.

🍊 Give your ads time to actually “wear in” (sometimes effectiveness even goes up.)

🍊 Get real data about what real people think, not what YOU think.