Trends in Advertising

Trends in Advertising
By Paul Herbig

Advertising has ventured into new areas, gray areas, in a similar obvious mood to capture the attention of a desired target audience.

1) First, they're spending more in odd places. Not just on traditional TV ads, but a wide range of interesting and obscure media. Campbell's Soup bought ads on parking meters. Macy's spends a fortune each year on its Thanksgiving parade. Kellogg's has spent millions building a presence on the World Wide Web-a fascinating way to sell cereal.

Companies have seen that a mass-market broadcast strategy isn't working as well as it used to, especially when targeting the hard-to-reach upper income demographic. As this lucrative audience spends less time watching TV, marketers are working overtime trying to find media with less clutter, where their interruption techniques can be more effective.

Marketers hire Catalina Corporation to print their coupons on the back of receipts at the grocery store. They buy ads on the floor of the cereal aisle. There are ads atop taxis in New York City and on the boards around the rink at the hockey game. Fox even figured out a way to sell the rights to the small area over the catcher's shoulder, so TV viewers would see the ad throughout an entire baseball game.

(2) The second technique is to make advertisements ever more controversial and entertaining. Coca-Cola hired talent agency CAA to enlist top-flight Hollywood directors to make commercials. Candies features a woman sitting on a toilet in its magazine ads (for shoes!). Spike Lee's ad agency did more than fifty million dollars in billings last year.

Of course, as the commercials try harder to get your attention, the clutter becomes even worse. An advertiser who manages to top a competitor for the moment has merely raised the bar. Their next ad will have to be even more outlandish in order to top the competition, not to mention their previous ad, to keep the consumer's attention. The cost of making a first-rate TV commercial is actually far more, per minute, than a major Hollywood motion picture. Talking frogs, computer graphics and intense editing now seem to be a requirement.

A side effect of the focus on entertainment is that it gives the marketer far less time to actually market. In a fifteen second commercial (increasingly attractive as a cost-cutting way to interrupt people even more often), ten or even twelve seconds are devoted to getting your attention, while just a few heartbeats are reserved for the logo, the benefit and the call to action.

Take the interruption challenge! Write down all the companies who ran commercials during your favorite TV show last night. Write down all the companies that paid good money to buy banners on the Web during your last surfing expedition. If you can list more than ten percent of them, you're certainly the exception.

(3) The third approach used to keep mass marketing alive is to change ad campaigns more often in order to keep them "interesting and fresh." Tony the Tiger and Charlie Tuna and the Marlboro man are each worth billions of dollars in brand equity to the companies that built them. The marketers behind them have invested a fortune over the last forty years, making them trusted spokesmen (or spokesanimals) for their brands.

Nike, on the other hand, just ran a series of ads without the ‘swoosh’, arguably one of the most effective logos of the last generation. Apple Computer changes its tagline annually. Wendy's and McDonald's and Burger King jump from one approach to the other, all hoping for a holy grail that captures attention.

In exchange for these brief bits of attention (remember the hoopla when they replaced Mikey on the Life box?) these marketers are trading in the benefits of a long-term brand recognition campaign. It's a trade they're willing to make, because Interruption Marketing requires it. Without attention, there is no ad.

(4) The fourth and last approach, which is as profound as the other three, is that many marketers are abandoning advertising and replacing it with direct mail and promotions. Marketers now allocate about 52% of their annual ad budgets for direct mail and promotions, a significant increase over past years.

Of the more than $200 billion spent on consumer advertising last year in the US, more than $100 billion was spent on direct mail campaigns, in-store promotions, coupons, free standing inserts and other non-traditional media. Recently Wunderman, Cato, Johnson, did more than $1.6 billion in billings for its clients.

The next time you get a glossy mailing for a Lexus, or enter an instant win sweepstakes at the liquor store, you're seeing the results of this trend toward increased direct marketing efforts. Advertisers are using them because they work. They are somewhat more effective at interrupting you than an ad. They're somewhat more measurable than a billboard. Best of all, they give the marketer another tool to use in their increasingly frustrating fight against clutter. After all, there are only five or ten pieces of junk mail in your mailbox every day-not 3,000. And another few feet of shelf space at the supermarket can lead to a dramatic upturn in sales

A Providence based company pays collegians up to $150 to wear temporary logo tattoos on their foreheads for one week. Called Headvertise, eight clients have signed up, all seeking recognition in the coveted 18 to 24 crowd. Over fifty students have worn the decals. What next: ads on the cheeks for beachwear?