How do you feel about ads? Does this word hate come to mind? This is a common response. Whether its television, an online newspaper, blog, or radio program, ads are the price of free content, and have been since the dawn of public radio.

This distaste for ads has led to a number of challenges for marketers, such as ad blindness or banner blindness (Links to an external site.), when people teach themselves to simply overlook anything that looks like an ad. This is a problem that all marketers face, and it can lead to seriously wasted budgets and lost revenue.

For this discussion, pretend you are a marketer for Nom Nom (yes, theyre real their website is at www.nomnomnow.com (Links to an external site.)), a pet food company specializing in healthy food for dogs and cats, made fresh weekly and shipped directly to customers. Its essentially DoorDash for pets.

Choose whether you want to target dog or cat owners. Then describe what you might do with a display ad to overcome ad blindness and catch the eye of your target market without feeling intrusive? (Think in terms target market, ad content, size, placement, A/B testing, etc.)

NOTE: You do not need to create an ad for this discussion. Rather, discuss ways that you might overcome a customers aversion to an ad from Nom Nom.