What if the police put up lots of fake speed limit signs—that you didn’t have to follow—and then set up speed traps wherever the speed actually changed after a real sign? They would catch a lot of motorists going the wrong speed. Many people would fail to notice which the real signs were at first (did you take a close enough look at the photo with this article?).
But then what if someone tied huge orange banners to the fake signs?
Very quickly everyone would learn to tune out any sign with an orange banner. This is why banner ads on websites work so poorly. Because of their recognizable wide size and position at top or bottom, and because they are rarely relevant to our purpose in coming to a site, we quickly learn to tune them out.
Humans are great at tuning out non-relevant, easily identifiable information.
Twitter is putting ads that look like tweets at the top of streams. Their deadly problem is that they are literally teaching us to tune them out because they aren’t yet relevant to most people. They will have to become extraordinarily relevant or interesting to break through the fact that we are being taught not to read them. They are failing to use promoted tweets effectively to teach us not to tune out the “tweet at the top.”
How expensive will this mistake be?
At one of this country’s largest Renaissance Festival some years ag0, I had 50 people working for me at a series of souvenir shops. During the first year, I determined that awareness of our products was low. It was because salespeople were trained to behave aggressively toward visitors. Yes, they were entertaining, but people for the most part avoided the areas around the shops with the most “entertaining” salespeople, realizing they were basically being accosted.
So I set up a product display—basic merchandising—at location that led to a shop, but was not near the shop. People were free to visit or ignore the product while being guaranteed to avoid the salespeople. Sales had been stagnant at this location for several years, always hovering just under $100,000 for the 15 days of the festival. I didn’t get the display up for the first two days of the festival, so the test would only run for 13 days.
The result? Even though we’d missed nearly 1/7th of the festival, sales were OVER $200,000. That’s right—sales more than DOUBLED when we overcame the problem of people tuning out. (Traffic—the number of visitors— was steady and weather was similar for all the years of this test.)
No matter how great Twitter’s sponsored tweets are, if they TEACH people to tune them out, they’re going to lose the majority of their financial potential as a business.
What should they do instead then? They’re doing some of it by showing promoted tweets at the top too. These are the most popular, relevant tweets culled from a particular set of search results. But they need to to mix the sponsored (ad) tweets in very gently. I’ve experienced so many search results with sponsored tweets at the top I’ve long since stopped looking at the “tweet at the top.”
Twitter needs to make adjustments immediately if they are to overcome the natural ability of humans to tune out, or it will kill their business model.
Will Twitter listen?
In a word: no. The management of successful businesses does not listen to outside sources, as a rule. Twitter’s great success in becoming popular and well-known is a powerful force pushing them into the kind of cloistered tunnel vision that is common in those kinds of situations.
So, what happened at the renaissance festival?
I told the upper management at the festival why what I had done worked. Their response? Build a giant castle in that location, forcing people to go into the Lion’s den—an enclosed space filled with salespeople—just to see the product. The result? Sales dropped well below $100,000. Did management understand why? No. They made their plans without me, and in spite of my explanation. But I had just done the same thing for a chain of about 50 Midwestern health food stores a few years previously. I knew the power of humans to tune out, and how powerful it could be if you could overcome it.
At the health food stores, I had more than quadrupled key sales.
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