Facebook’s algorithm, which was re-designed to give your friends and family priority (which also means forcing businesses to pay so they can make money), changed a little more than a year ago and is believed to have decreased organic reach by 52%! This was the moment where social media advertising became no longer optional for companies but essential for best results. With businesses being forced into the inevitable pay-to-play model, the ad space has become highly saturated and competitive, driving auction prices (the amount you pay per click or view for your paid social media) up significantly. Higher bid prices mean you must be much more efficient to squeeze out profit than a couple of years ago.

Advertisers have increasingly switched to social media advertising as a strategy to combat the rise of online ad-blockers, network affiliate relevance, and general consumer suspicion when your business is not represented correctly in the digital sphere.

Even though you can beat most ad-blockers on the social networks, you can’t expunge the attitudes driving their adoption. About 50% of the people using ad-blockers simply find ads “annoying and irrelevant.” It’s as if some consumers are admittedly huge fans of chocolate chip cookies but simply cannot bear to eat another.

Most businesses know you can’t eat on a full stomach but remain adamant about continuing to fight through the noise, pushing their own cookie message at all costs. After one too many offerings, the audience is now sick of cookies.

Almost 80% of the time spent on social media is done from mobile devices (though we still feel serious shoppers for luxury investments research more and purchase at a greater rate on desktop and laptop). This is notable because our mobile phones are far more personal than any other touchpoint.

That means that advertising has taken on an all-new level of intrusiveness – and even if consumers can’t block your ads, they are just a thumb-scroll away and maybe they should be. After all, who wants a baker randomly popping up in your own personal kitchen offering fresh baked cookies in the midst of life’s daily activities and responsibilities with no proper understanding of timing, what the audience is in the mood for that day, and (maybe most importantly) knowledge of if he is even welcome to begin with?

What kind of baker is your business? Do you serve up warm freshly baked cookies at the perfect time and reap the rewards or do you just make a batch that will last all year and let them go a bit stale for your audience hoping no one will notice?

The concept of “personalization” is certainly not a new idea in social media; however, there is a learning curve for most businesses to connect with people on a deeper, more genuine level. For instance, while many people love seeing chocolate chip cookies, an ad for high-protein health cookies is better customized for someone on a diet. Not surprisingly and just like cookies, most consumers are open to personalized ads. Adobe even found that 78% ‘like them’. A Yahoo study concurred, adding that consumers find them more engaging (54%), educational (52%), time-saving (49%) and memorable (45%) than general-audience ads.