Stop Pushing Ads No One Wants and Start Making Offers They Can’t Ignore

Ask any consumer whether they enjoy being advertised to, and the answer is a near-universal no. Gartner reports that 81% of consumers now tune ads out. Over half of Americans use ad-blocking software. Streaming subscribers pay premiums to not see ads. People scroll past banners without really seeing them. They feel creeped out when a product they glanced at once follows them across the internet for two weeks.

But those same consumers actively seek out coupons. They sign up for loyalty programs. They subscribe to promotional retailer emails. They click on cash back deals in their banking apps.

They feel good about those interactions.

Why the contradiction? Because there is a fundamental psychological difference between an ad and an offer.

The uninvited ad problem

Consider this scenario: An ad for Tide laundry detergent interrupts your news feed. You weren’t thinking about detergent. The ad is irrelevant, even mildly annoying. It’s a brand demanding attention without permission.

Now imagine a second scenario: You’re in your banking app and get a notification to “Earn $2 cash back on your next Tide purchase at Target.” Suddenly, the same brand lands differently. It’s not seen as an interruption. It’s a valuable tip. It feels like your financial institution is doing you a favor, helping you save.

The product is the same. The commercial intent is the same. But the experience is completely different. One intrudes, the other assists.

This is the insight that marketers most often miss: The value exchange matters as much as the message itself. Consumers don’t resent commerce. They resent being treated just as a means to someone else’s end.

Interruption vs. assistance

Traditional advertising was built on a pretty straightforward premise: reach enough eyeballs enough times and eventually a sale happens for some fraction of the audience. It worked well enough, for long enough that the industry optimized around it.

But the model is fundamentally extractive. Consumer attention is the resource being consumed, with the consumer receiving little in return for that attention.

This is why ad fatigue is real. It’s not that people have become immune to marketing; rather, it’s that interruptive advertising asks for something (attention, consideration, time) without really offering anything back.

On the other hand, an offer creates a significant psychological shift. When a brand presents a discount, a rebate or a cash-back incentive, the perception shifts. Now it feels like the consumer is getting something of value. They’re in a position to receive a benefit, not give up their valuable attention. That changes the feeling of the entire interaction.

Commerce media transforms the pitch

The industry has long experimented with “native advertising.” These ads are effectively designed to blend into surrounding content — as though simply hiding that it’s an ad was the answer to consumer skepticism. Consumers are smarter than that.

The better answer is to make “ads” into something worth receiving. Design marketing that consumers would choose to receive if given the option, because it delivers genuine value. In short, build campaigns around offers, not just messages.

The infrastructure to do this at scale is maturing rapidly. Commerce media networks sit at the intersection of advertising and rewards, and are enabling brands to deliver this kind of value-forward marketing. They are typically built on existing consumer-facing ecosystems, such as a bank account.

For example, Chase Bank’s Chase Media Solutions is an offer network that delivers rewards tied to purchases in customers’ bank accounts, and Mastercard launched Mastercard Commerce Media to deliver personalized offers to individual consumers based on insights from transaction data across its payment network.

These networks are powered by permissioned transaction data, so they can match the right offer to the right consumer at the right moment: not based on what someone browsed, but on what they actually buy. The offer arrives when it’s relevant, through a channel the consumer already trusts, with a tangible benefit (savings) ideally attached.

For marketers, this represents a meaningful shift in what’s possible. Reaching consumers through a financial platform changes the context of the interaction entirely. The “ad” receives a halo effect of the existing trust towards the platform delivering it.

Better attribution and measurable ROAS

Because commerce media is inherently trackable, the path from a consumer taking an action on a commerce media network offer to completing a transaction can be fully attributed. Brands can measure whether the offer drove an action (e.g. purchase), not just whether someone saw it.

Best of all? The combination of right offer + right person + right time = greater likelihood of the consumer taking the desired action. This means the advertiser’s media buy is more efficient and drives real results (sales), which create measurable return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) vs. guessing at whether the cost of the impressions delivered eventually drove sales.

When an ad is also an offer, meaning when seeing it means you’re about to save money and not just be sold to, the adversarial dynamic associated with the “old” way of advertising disappears.

Consumers don’t resent offers that deliver meaningful value. They welcome them. Brands that build around that recognition will find the work of marketing getting easier. The consumer stops being an obstacle to be overcome and becomes a participant who actually wants what’s being offered.