You are not making this easy on advertisers.
You, the person exposed to a daily barrage of ads, a veteran at tuning them out as you go about your business.
You, the person who can drive miles and miles in “the zone,” immersed in your own thoughts, only vaguely aware of the billboards flashing by, the ads on the radio, the cross-promotion on the Coke in your cupholder.
You are the reason advertisers are on a multi-million dollar hunt for new ways to grab even a moment’s attention. The Pampers ads now being plastered on supermarket floors. The ads on the eggshells. The promos popping up on on gas pumps, ATMs, cash registers. The giant ads wrapped around automobiles, the latest novelty on Chicago area roads. Those promotional wallets GE Financial Network scattered downtown (see photo at left).
For all the money and marketing minds involved in such campaigns, this often feels like nothing more than a game of “Gotcha! Made you look.” And it’s just beginning.
Advertising has loomed large in our cultural landscape for years. But never before has so much money and creative firepower been aimed at our mental landscapes, at getting brains already on commercial overload to notice one more brand, one more slogan, one more product.
Not even the scientists know for sure how many commercial blips can be absorbed in a day by those three pounds of wrinkly tissue and tiny nerves that hold our memories, our ideas, our preferences, our personalities.
This much is certain. Sparked by changing technology and the omnipresence of ads, a new era of competition is on. Now the race is not only for market share but for what is known as “mind share.”
“Advertising and the media in general are competing for every moment of human attention,” said Stuart Ewen, media studies professor at Hunter College in New York City. “Any moment when people are going to potentially look, see or listen is an opportunity.
“That’s why we have 30-second ads in elevators, taxi cabs wrapped with Yahoo advertising. You walk down the sidewalk and you’re seeing — projected in light along your feet — an ad for a restaurant. I’m in the urinal and there’s an ad. You buy an apple and there’s a little sticker advertising a movie.”
Tradition dominates
More traditional ads, on TV, radio, billboards, and in newspapers and magazines, still dominate advertising.
But companies big and small have reason to experiment with other ways to promote their brands. Those alternative ads often cost less, and they promise to catch consumers’ attention amid the clutter.
The element of surprise makes you look, if only for a moment.
“Saturation sets in and it takes a new stimulus to break through the clutter,” said Susan Fournier, an associate professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. “That’s a principle in psychology of how we take notice of things.”
“There’s an effort to hang an ad in front of our eyes every waking moment of the day and to use every square inch of surface that can be plastered with an ad or a billboard, and it’s getting worse and worse, especially as corporations are finding it harder to surprise us,” said Gary Ruskin, director of the non-profit Commercial Alert in Washington, D.C.
“So the barrier to jump over for recognition gets higher and higher,” said Ruskin, whose group lobbies to restrict certain forms of advertising, especially to children. “The race to invade new space is steam-rolling.”
Just how many ads Americans are exposed to each day is a matter of debate. Some industry observers, including the publishers of Consumer Reports, have estimated the number to be 3,000 ads a day, though studies are scarce.
James Twitchell, author of last year’s “Twenty Ads that Shook the World,” points out that who you are and where you live influences how many ads are aimed your way.
“If you’re 14 years old in Chicago, you probably see 3,000 a day,” Twitchell said. “If you’re 50 years old and in northern Florida, you probably see 1,000.” (Youth is an appealing demographic; brand loyalties are still being formed.)
Not everybody minds ad creep, of course, or at least not all parts of it. After all, lots of people flip on the television the same way they flip on the lights.And all those ads can be seen as the vibrant expression of a thriving economy, even with the current downturns. In our consumer culture, ads may irritate and intrude but they also entertain and inform, at least some of them. They are a language we all know, common points of reference.
Fournier studies people’s relationships with brands. She said her research shows brands, and presumably the ads for them, can be a good thing, helping people navigate a consumer culture and even bolstering their sense of order and identity.
Or ads can be white noise, barely noticeable. At O’Hare International last Friday, computer installer Bob Parsons strode past a slew of framed mini-billboards on his way to a gate to await his flight to Philadelphia.
A frequent traveler, he found a seat under one of the TV monitors at the gate, broadcasting CNN programs tailored for airports. Parsons tapped away on his laptop, seemingly oblivious to an ad for Sprint long-distance telephone service and another for a TV war program that featured the sound of gunfire and the loud chop of helicopters.
“I just tune it out,” Parsons, 62, said with a shrug. “It’s just so much noise.”
Same goes for the radio spots he ignored that morning, Parsons said, and the newspaper and Internet ads he glanced past. “I don’t think I could remember one,” he said.
Big savings?
Not that we’re usually allowed to vote on such things, but Twitchell, who teaches English and American culture at the University of Florida in Gainesville, believes many of us are willing to co-exist with an extra dose of commercialism if it promises to save money — on stamps, for example, or basketball tickets or bus fare.
“That concept of exchanging concentration for lowered price is what is putting advertising wraps around buses,” Twitchell said. “It’s what’s allowing advertising on the U.S. Postal Service trucks, where it’s about to appear. . . . It’s why sports stadiums carry commercial names.”
In a similar vein, a pilot program in Orlando, Fla., makes passengers on some city buses a captive audience for television monitors with news, announcements of upcoming bus stops, and, of course, commercials. Other city bus systems reportedly are considering mounting such monitors aboard buses as a way to keep fares lower.
For all the economic incentive behind ad creep, some critics believe it comes at a steep price, for individuals and for the nation.
“The psychological effect of this saturation is very complex and mostly, maybe entirely, negative,” said Mark Crispin Miller, a media studies professor at New York University. “We’re all surrounded by these idealizing mirrors that are constantly telling us what we should be like: better equipped, richer, cooler, more attractive.
Psychopathic values
“They’re not telling us to be kinder, better people,” Miller said. “The values promoted incessantly are psychopathic values. That you come first and you are entitled to the best life has to offer. And you can buy the best life has to offer.”
Increasingly, ad watchers predict, commercial messages will become not only more prevalent but harder to distinguish from the rest of life.
Fournier said that so-called “stealth advertising,” is on the upswing, something we can expect to see more and more.
Examples, she said, are students hired to pass out coasters advertising a certain brand of beer at college parties, or the youths paid to pose as regular Internet users and promote new CDs to other young people in chat rooms.
“The marketing side of the equation may be . . . a little too under the radar,” Fournier said.
Twitchell and others predict that another major area for ad creep will be municipalities and other government entities in search of subsidies.
Public schools, of course, already are home to all kinds of controversies over whether it’s appropriate to allow advertising to students in exchange for money or equipment. Debates center on advertising banners on school property, fast food promotions and, especially, Channel One, the company which donates expensive equipment to schools that agree to show its daily news and commercials. Already, at least one Colorado school district has allowed ads on the exterior of school buses in exchange for financial help.
In New Jersey, an enterprising businessman paid beach towns a fee to rake ads for Snapple and Skippy peanut butter right into the sand with a special apparatus pulled by a tractor. No matter that the ads get trampled; the promotions are raked in anew each morning.
Natural selection
Twitchell’s college students, born in the 1980s and raised within the ever-expanding arena for commercials, point out all the places they think are naturals for ads. If anything, Twitchell said, they are surprised they haven’t seen ads there — yet.
“My students think, OK, what about in stoplights?” Twitchell said. “`When the light changes from red to green, why not have a little ad that pops up there? Or on the actual highway? Why not on the side of airplanes?’ my students say. `Why not have it on the runways?'”
“This is our culture,” Twitchell said.
He added a prediction of his own. “I’m sure somebody, if they haven’t tried to do it, will try to buy [space on] human skin.”
Turns out some San Francisco residents already have tattooed a restaurant’s logo on their skin in exchange for food.
Casa Sanchez, a Mission District taqueria, offered free meals a few years back to customers who would get the tattoo. No easy tattoo, the logo is a sombrero-wearing boy astride an ear of corn shaped like a rocket. The deal: anytime you show up in the restaurant with the tattoo, you get a free meal.
To the owners’ surprise, the idea was a hit. Fearing they would have to give away too much free food, the owners cut off promotion after more than 40 people got the tattoo.
