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Reach people who never see ads
Guests hear ads too
Before an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, one of the hosts read him a Ramp ad directly, with the headphones already on. Every guest hears an ad as they join, spends the conversation looking at a screen covered in sponsor logos, and may hear the next ad read after hopping off.
Clips carry sponsors
Clips carry the sponsor too. Every clip has the brand's logo, and each one-minute clip ends with a full ad read. Some viewers scroll away, but a lot stick around. A clip about an AI-for-legal company might get only a few thousand views, yet it gets sent around that small community and to competitors, so it lands with the right people, the way trade media does.
Short, frequent ads
Live ads had to be short, because people bail on a 90-second spot. Instead of a few of those, advertisers got around 250 twenty-second ads, which sells repetition and frequency. The ad reads are memorized, and buttons pull up a graphic that takes over the screen quickly, so nobody has time to pull out a phone.
Why does hearing the same ad repeatedly work?
Psychologist Robert Zajonc described the mere-exposure effect in 1968: people tend to like things more the more often they encounter them. Advertisers use the same logic when they buy frequency, repeating a short message until it feels familiar. Zajonc published the finding in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Why do advertisers value trade media despite small audiences?
Trade media serves readers in a single profession, so an advertiser reaches buyers with little wasted exposure. Circulation is small, but the readers often make purchasing decisions, so rates per reader tend to run higher than in mass media. Variety, founded in 1905 to cover entertainment, is a long-running example of the form.
How did ad skipping become common?
Viewers have been finding ways around ads for as long as there has been technology to help them. TiVo, whose first retail boxes shipped in 1999, popularized skipping commercials in recorded television. Paid ad-free tiers and browser ad blockers later extended the habit to streaming and the web.
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