Foremost among marketing’s many responsibilities is filling the sales funnel with new prospects. Historically, this meant brands needed to insert their brand’s message in front of as many potential customers as possible, as often as possible. Ultimately, this gave rise to a number of advertising formats like print, TV, radio, outdoor, direct mail, and internet banners. Whatever a person enjoyed spending time doing, an ad could and would interrupt the experience essentially forcing the prospect to shut up and listen. Thus, the term Interruption Marketing.

The effectiveness of this interruptive approach is declining at a rapid pace. Online banner ads, for example, were incredibly successful 10 years ago and currently have a click through rate of less than one-tenth of one percent. The drop off is due to a number of factors. Three of which include:

Ad Overload: The onslaught of advertising messages is so overwhelming that consumers are recoiling, building a form of “attention immunity” against ads. To put this in perspective, the average person sees 5,000 branded messages a day.

Real Information is Elsewhere: While consumers may have once looked to advertising as a way to stay informed about products, objective information proliferate the internet.

The Consumer is in Control: People are turning ads off. Whether fast-forwarding on DVRs or installing ad blocking software in their browsers, consumers are armed with technology in the war for their attention.

It is these three main factors that are changing the marketing landscape as we know it. The consumers brands strive so hard to attract are no longer a resource in which we can strip-mine and abandon. They are an asset. Why not treat them as such.