Advertising Ad Nauseam-Traditional Advertising Fights Back
I’ve blogged quite a bit here about the shift in power taking place in advertising. The traditional advertising model of pushing marketing messages through a few, controlled channels (tv, radio, magazines and other forms of traditional media) is undergoing rapid change. Consumers, armed with technology to exclude interruptive ads (e.g., DVR’s, Satellite Radio, RSS feeds, and Pop-up Blockers) and an ever-increasing range of choices for their attention (e.g., how many of us substitute YouTube for television?) are taking more control over the advertising relationship.
And how has the advertising industry responded? Like a drug addict in a vicious cycle of addiction. If one interruptive message isn’t working any more, let’s deliver two or three or four messages. In other words, let’s spend huge sums of money creating new and more innovate ways to interrupt and potentially annoy consumers. The USAToday ran a great article on this topic last week, Product Placement–you can’t escape it.
The article describes this desperate cycle in great detail, and cites a list of really interesting supporting facts, including:
- The average city inhabitant is now bombarded with 3,000 to 5,000 ad messages per day, up from around 500 in the 1970’s
- Prime time television commercials on MTV increased 21% last year
- Out of home marketing (billboards to elevator ads) increased to $6.3 billion last year
- Conservative companies like P&G are putting ads inside public bathroom stalls
- Even school kids are being deluged as School Districts sell out to advertisers (including one district selling ads on the outside of its buses)
The solution to this addiction? The article points to the new advertising buzzword of engagement. Basically, put away your shotgun approach and spend more money to create value in your advertising, value that will engage the consumers you want to reach. There a lots of ways to do this. We are certainly working on this at Jellyfish (when you interact with advertising at Jellyfish it actually saves you extra money). Others are doing it by creating more entertaining ads. Lots more innovation is coming. Let’s hope for all of us that we see more engagement and less advertising ad nauseam in the coming months and years or we may be reading ads on our toliet paper soon.
