Scary Ads

Do technology marketers use fear in advertising because it’s just easier? I saw a three-year-old burst into tears the other day after being told she would be kidnapped if she let go of mommy’s hand. Obviously this mother saw fear as the more efficient way to approach her problem.

As adults marketing to adults, Sarbanes-Oxley is being particularly exploited in fear-based advertising. Do you ever see vendors talk about the “joys of compliance?” 

Is fear simply more fun? 
Internal IT departments are particularly good at using threats to scare their users with things like, "Users that don't update their PCs risk being locked out of the network for good. And, they will never IM again."

Would the highly-rated reality show, Fear Factor, work if it was approached with a Happy Factor? Is it more fun to show a terrified IT guy with a pink slip that failed to protect the enterprise against hackers .. than happy users in a safe environment?

Are you tempted by fear?
Tempting as it is, fear has its limitations. If you’ve raised children, or ever been a kid, you are well aware that the boy who cried wolf wasn’t successful. While fear may be work well in the short term, it doesn’t help us create long-term relationships.

Our friends at MarketingSherpa caution us about scaring our audience into action. Its recent advertising survey shows IT professionals care about safety, but are turned off by ads that try to scare them into it. So why do marketers use fear?

According to MarketingSherpa, many high-tech marketers think fear is more attention-grabbing. But they advise we listen to our audience. IT professionals don’t respect scary messages that insult their intelligence.

Their survey revealed: “IT pros have been bombarded by far too many ads warning about bugs, hackers, and the rest of technology-related fears marketers hope to play on.”  As detailed in their Special Report on what IT professionals think of advertising, 75 percent agreed with this statement:  “Fear-based ads tend to overstate the danger, and I tend to ignore those ads."

When do you think it’s appropriate to scare your audience?  Are there those instances where  being scary might be the best way to go?

75 percent of the respondents in a MarketingSherpa survey agreed with this statement:  “Fear-based ads tend to overstate the danger, and I tend to ignore those ads."