By Georgia Traylor, Planning Executive
As we look forward to 2023, there will be many who are not sentimental about leaving the past few years behind them. Even if they have never heard the term, they will be familiar with the concept ‘hyper fatigue’. It encapsulates the overwhelm we all feel from experiencing crisis after crisis: years of being bombarded by media stories about the pandemic, rising cost of living, the energy crisis, war, and climate. All this on top of seeing too much digital content and far too many ads.
Intuitively we know what research shows; many of us feel more fatigued and overwhelmed by digital content now than we did before the pandemic. The figure is 36% across demographics, but if your audience are coveted 18-24 or 25–34-year-olds, overwhelm and fatigue shoots up to 45% and 47% respectively.
What then is the strategy for marketers whose job it is to cut through our collective malaise? Without a doubt, one of the most powerful ways to mitigate hyper fatigue is to focus comms into one simple message and push imagery over information. The theory, backed by robust research, is that too many messages in an ad dilutes communications, whereas sticking to one is a sure-fire way to bolster impact.
Take Müller, whose OOH campaign for their Corner yoghurts featured nothing but a zoomed in shot of the iconic yoghurt with its corner of jam (or chocolate balls if they’re more to your taste) and a small logo in the…pun not intended, corner. Marketing Week named it their most effective campaign of September 2022 owing to its simplicity, credibility, and distinctiveness.
Another way to keep campaign comms simple is by eschewing any meaningful message at all. The current best in class here is Belvedere, with the November launch of a brand film featuring Daniel Craig in several outlandish outfits, including a grill bearing his initials, dancing through a beautiful Parisian building to a backing track by Rita Ora and Giggs, directed by Taika Waititi. The film seems to have very little to do with the brand and raises more questions than it answers, but this is exactly the point. In the current cluttered media landscape responsible for hyper fatigue, Belvedere is going for salience above all else.
