Technical jargon: What does "ad fatigue" actually mean?
Benno Maggi explains marketing and communications terms in his column "Technical jargon".
Everyone talks about it when it comes to planning or evaluating online campaigns, and everyone gets annoyed as a consumer when they are affected by it themselves. What is meant here is the fatigue that comes over you when you look at the same and often wrong ads over and over again. The fatigue, because of which one does not even like to click away, but is simply annoyed. The word has been haunting agencies for a long time, but is currently celebrating a revival in the offices of the clients, because now really everyone has realized that online advertising is measurable, but not necessarily successful per se.
The numbers and data generated, collected and presented in connection with online campaigns have lost some of their magic or are just "fatigue". And with the prefix "ad", everything that is paid online advertising is included here: video, banner, content and whatever fatigue, whether it is on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tiktok or elsewhere.
So, for those who are privately annoyed by non-targeted, unnecessarily recurring advertising, or in a business context by poor conversions, lack of targeting and frequency capping by agencies, here's what we recommend: Do the same as with physical fatigue.
Take breaks (lower frequency), go offline, sleep or move more (rotating channels and subjects), wake yourself up with a coffee, Redbull or matcha (relevance and content spice up) or adapt your lifestyle to your body (targeting and retargeting).
* Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He created the column "Vom Fach" in the NZZ Folio and was in charge of it for years. He presents and decodes words and terms that can be used either for small talk, being important, getting excited, playing Scrabble or simply for fun.
