I never did find out how the Daz guy dived.

There's an advert on TV at the moment. Daley Thompson walks into a greasy cafe and starts speaking to the man serving. We learn that he used to be a champion diver but has recently let himself go. However, drama! The diving team is one man short and he is their only hope of victory! Unfortunately his diving trunks are disgusting (I think he's been using them to do the dishes, mental) and he is ashamed to wear them out. Thank God, then, for Daz! It can make his shorts shiny and white again. The man, now full of self confidence, is then seen climbing up to a diving board and getting ready to launch himself off the edge into a world he once knew so well.

Then the advert ends.
We don't see how well the dive went, instead we're encouraged (albeit briefly) to go to Daz's Facebook page to find out the results.

This advert has been airing for a few months now and up until this point I am yet to go to their Facebook page at all. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one either. But why is this? The ad isn't awful, it's pretty true to form, and part of me does really want to see the fat man jump into a pool of water just like it wanted to see Peter Kay do the same for John Smith's.

The intrigue! The suspense!

The problem is this: laziness.

This isn't just my laziness, which often does affect my life in unfortunate ways, it's the laziness of everyone else watching television at the time too. 

We watch television to relax, to get away from the real world and to pretend we're the characters we're seeing before us. (I was Alan Shearer on Match of the Day at the weekend. It was dull.) When commercials air we watch them not out of choice, but because we have to. Commercials just go into our heads and are largely forgotten about straight after.

Social media commercials, on the other hand, require effort.

Some of them just appear on the side of your news feed. We see them out of the corners of our eyes and then reload the page in the hope that the girl we like has updated her status in a way that you can comment on to appear clever. Shut up, we do. It's a real thing. 

What we don't do on social media, unless you're being paid to, is actively search adverts out. We're online to chat to our friends and, more often than not, to relieve the sense of boredom that has overcome the rest of our day. We're not online to be sold to. Brands get around this problem by creating communities or by doing something a bit different, a bit more intelligent. They have to become a part of your every day social routine rather than creating something that means you have to go out of your way to enjoy it. That's why I, and no doubt you, will never discover the results of the Daz diving ad. It's effort. The reward of that effort for us is minimal.

Flipping the roles around the other way would likely work better. I'm going to watch TV and if an ad comes on there's a very good chance I'll see it. I don't have to put any extra effort in, I don't have to click any extra buttons.

If a Facebook page tells me an ad will be coming on I will feel like a valued member of that community and be happy when I see it, like it's some sort of prize. Like I'm special for clicking the like button.

If the TV tells me what to do, on the other hand, I'll just feel like writing a half intellectual blog post about it. I doubt that's what they really wanted.