Some People Say Our Ads Are Annoying. Is That Bad? Should We Tone It Down?

The complaints feel like a warning. Someone calls. Someone posts online. Someone tells your receptionist, "I am so tired of hearing your ad." And your gut says: Uh oh. We've gone too far.

The real risk in moments like these is that you might metaphorically blink, step back, and retreat into the kind of bland, forgettable work that never bothers anyone simply because no one ever notices it.

The only thing a complaint really says is this: your ad broke through. And that’s the goal.

That person heard it; they remember it. They can probably repeat parts of it back to you. We live in a world where most ads wash over people like background noise, and if you can avoid that, you’ll be sitting pretty.

The actual sign of failure is silence. No complaints. No comments. No reaction at all. Just money going out and nothing coming back.

People don't hate advertising. They hate boring advertising. They hate predictable advertising. When your ad surprises people, some of them will love it and some of them will be annoyed by it. Both groups prove the same thing: the message landed.

Indifference is the killer. Irritation is just evidence that somebody's paying attention.

Who's Doing the Complaining?

Now ask yourself: who called to complain?

Was it a customer who just spent $12,000 on a new system? Or was it someone who has never bought from you and probably never will?

Almost always, it's the second one. The loudest critics are rarely your buyers. They're people who heard your ad while they weren't in the market, got it stuck in their head, and got annoyed that they couldn't get it back out.

That’s unfortunate for them, but it has no bearing whatsoever on how you should proceed with your advertising.

The people who will buy something from you in the future, perhaps when their furnace dies at midnight in January, are quietly storing your name in the back of their minds. They won't complain about the ad; they'll just call you when they need you, and they'll call you first. A few complaints do not represent your market. For every person who sends in something negative, there could be a hundred people who smiled, or nodded, or simply remembered.

Don’t Blink: It Kills Campaigns

So you think you need to "tone it down", and you do so.

You soften the language; you sand off the edges. (Article: Honesty Versus Trust.) You make the ad more polite and reasonable, and more, sadly, like every other ad in your industry. It might feel better for a few weeks, and the complaints might stop, but then something else stops: the phone.

It doesn’t happen immediately, and you can’t necessarily connect it to the change you made because the timing probably won’t be obvious. The problem is this: you traded a message people couldn't ignore for a message people couldn't remember. (Article: On Consistency.)

Most ads aren't written to persuade. They're written not to offend. And the result is mushy, mundane, mediocre work that moves no one.

Run strong, stand-out ads for as long as you can. The longer you run them, the better they work, and they’ll start to compound. (Article: On Being Remembered.) People will hear them over and over, and your name will become firmly stuck in their memory. You start sliding backward the moment you break eye contact and go quiet, or the moment you make your ads boring. The energy needed to get back lost momentum is far more than simply keeping it.

What Genuine Bad Advertising Actually Looks Like

There is a real line, though, and some ads really do cross it.

A polarizing ad makes a strong promise and has a clear point of view. It sounds like a real person talking, and not a company or a script. Some people love it, and some people don't, but everyone knows what you stand for when they see or hear it.

A truly bad ad insults or misleads your customers and makes a promise your company can't keep. It might be confusing, or even if it's entertaining, the entertainment factor has nothing to do with why someone should hire you.

To test your own ads, ask yourself three questions: does this ad tell the truth about who you are? Does it say something which might mean something to your potential customers? And would you be proud of it if a reporter ever put a microphone in your face and asked you about it?

If the answer to all three is yes, you're on the right side of the line. The complaints are just the sound of a message doing its job.

Let Them Be Annoyed

The people who will never buy from you don't get to decide how you talk to the people who will.

You have to protect the thing that makes you impossible to forget. Someone will finally need what you sell, and at a moment you can't predict or control. And when that happens, you want your name to be the first one to float to the surface.

It’ll only happen if you were brave enough to put it there in the first place.

The people who are annoyed can stay annoyed. Keep your distinctive voice, and stay in the fight.