How do you feel when you click on a banner ad?
Do you remember what you said under your breath the last time you accidentally did that?

And how do you feel when your local politician cold calls using a recorded message at 7.30pm the night before an election, asking for your vote? (I really hope that Western Australia is the last place on the planet where they actually do that in 2014).

When I put the banner ad question to a group of three hundred of the smartest marketers in Australia at Content Marketing World the answers ranged from “like an idiot”, to “I feel dirty”.

If this is how traditional advertising and cold calls and banner ads and interruption make us feel, why do we use these tactics on our customers? Why should we expect our customers to do something that we feel stupid about doing ourselves?

If we want smart, loyal customers we’ve got to start treating them as if they are.

Image by Vistavision.