Interruption Marketing

Interruption Marketing
By Paul Herbig



Consulting firm Accenture claims the average American will be subjected to 3000 advertising impressions daily, up from 640 just 15 years ago. Another research firm indicates the Average American will view 20,000 TV commercials annually and over one million ad impressions a year. My gut feel is that they have badly underestimated the real count of ad messages the typical American gets daily.

On my way home from work, I see Marquees, retail signs, billboards, light shows while I listen to radio and its multiple ads framework. Outdoor displays glare in their brillance. Gas prices. Vending machines. Convenience shores hawking cigarettes by the pack. Daily specials for restaurants. To paraphrase, a brand here and a brand there and soon we are talking about real advertising.

I get home and open my mailbox. I practically need a sack to toss in all my mail. I get inside and take my usual position near the round file. Two or three more credit card companies. Insurance. Brokers. A half dozen catalogs, most of them unsolicited Insurance. The usual telecommunications request to switch long distance. After ten minutes and a filled basket, I can read the two bills and one letter that is left. (I do a similar routine at the office when the mail is delivered with the same ratio of worthy messages to chaff).

Then I log on to the computer. I have two email accounts: one at the office and one at home. Between both of them I easily get over 100 emails a day, eighty percent or greater of which are spam . I have checked with some of my counterparts in the business community and they say I am lucky, they sometimes get that many by lunchtime. A 2001 study for the European Commission found that spam costs computer issuers 10 million euros world-wide in wasted connection time, let alone the human costs in deleting and sorting the few gold nuggets from the tons of worthless ore. I have had an AOL account since 1994, nearly ten years, and it has been only in the last several years that spam has become a major issue. Spammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, using informality (our first name) in the subject line as a ruse to get the user to read the message. The effort consumers will go through to eliminate spam knows few bounds (filters, programs) but the efforts spammers go through to defeat these defenses are far greater. This phenomena appears to be increasing and amazing as it seems, seems it can only worsen. Will the spam drown out the few worthy messages? Will you be able to use the media when it the time involved in sorting outweighs the benefits to be gained form using it?

Of course, just before dinner comes the telemarketer’s call (that reminds me I need to add my number to the do not call list). If I am lucky I sit down to enjoy a few minutes of television after dinner to relax. And see some of those 20,000 commercials I am expected to view this year. TV ad viewing has dropped and is expected to continue to drop 19 percent in the next five years. New devices such as TiVo make it easy for viewers to skip ads with the click of a button, making TV advertising much less effective. Advertisers indicate at some critical point, if enough users opt out of viewing the advertising, they will reconsider using the medium. Not that I am worried about this as I watch the few minutes of show for each hour of commercials.

Interruption marketing it is called. Most of the twentieth century marketing preoccupied itself with advertising by interruption. But this system is beginning to break down. Time is too important; most people are overworked with little extra time on their hands. Stress is omnipresent. Information overload confuses us. Consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and irritated with this constant source of disturbances. Interruption marketing will become increasingly ineffective due to legal and technological obstacles and consumer resistance. Continue to do business as it always has been done will not suffice in the future.

Entertaining. Informative. Provide a service. Provide Value-added as saving time or money or effort for your customers or would-be customers. This is the wave of the future. This is how you will get your customers’ attention and everlasting thank yous for saving them from a lifetime of interruptions.