Tag Archives: advertising

Advertising

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“With advertising revenue being the significant contributor to Facebook’s success, the risk for Facebook lies in the possibility that users will get bored of its properties – or of its ads,” Littleton said.

Advertising has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My dad was in radio for 30+ years and I was in or around it for 40. And advertising paid the bills. In 1971 I was road-tripping across the country with a friend when the radio station we were listening to broke for a commercial. I remember thinking, “I could write a radio commercial.” A year later I started working at a small town station and —over the next dozen years— wrote and produced a shit load of commercials. In the 70s, in our little town, you could advertise in the daily newspaper, on the radio, or you could rent a billboard.

In the late 40’s and 50’s, small town radio was such a new thing that listeners were happy to listen to anything on the radio. Music, news, commercials… how cool is that?! Joe Bankhead tells this story well.

Did any/all of those ads “work?” Were they effective? Not sure I thought about it at the time. If we wanted to keep the station on the air, we had to sell ads. I’ve thought about advertising a lot in the ensuing years. We pointed out to advertisers that our ads were “intrusive.” A good thing. Before they could hear the next song or the rest of the newscast, they had to listen to the commercial(s).

Somewhere along the way music radio stations came up with the idea of “stop sets.” Instead of mixing “spots” in with the songs, they’d stop twice an hour and play as many as eight commercials in a row. Advertisers would pay a premium to be the first, or the last, in the set.

In those days a radio spot was either “price and item” or “image.” Those of us who wrote and produced the spots liked to do image ads because it gave us creative freedom. Small market radio guru Jerrell Shepherd insisted all spots on his stations be price-and-item because it was the only way the advertiser could know his ads were working. Someone would come in and ask about the lawnmower sale he heard on the radio.

Any time an advertiser would question whether or not the ads were working, we’d explain they were “branding” his business in the (subconscious) minds of listeners.

In traditional media (radio, TV, print) it was pretty easy to tell what was a commercial and what was programming/content. When the internet came along someone figured out it might be useful to make a paid commercial message look like the content on the page. Finally we knew for certain: people hated ads. They installed software to block them. They used their DVR’s to skip them.

Today, the best advertising doesn’t really look like advertising. I think Amazon has probably perfected the art. An Amazon product page includes images of the product; reviews; and recommendations of similar products in which you might be interested. And if you don’t like something you bought, no problem. Easy returns.

I’ll admit to being a little amazed anyone keeps buying ads. They must believe they work. And it’s difficult to imagine our “consumer economy” working without advertising. Despite my life-long dependence, I am advertising averse. It’s like your next door neighbors inviting you over for drinks only to spring an Amway pitch on you. Or that Jehovah’s Witness who interrupts your nap with a fistful of Watchtowers.

Truth in Advertising

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Written by David Chiavegato and its director, Tim Hamilton, Truth In Advertising is a genuinely funny comedy that was nominated for a Palm d’Or in 2001. Colin Mochrie, best known as a regular on Whose Line Is It Anyway? in the US and UK, is the boss in an advertising agency where everybody tells the embarrassing truth about…advertising.

Nanoinfluencers

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“Nanos” for short. From the NYT story:

“People who have as few as 1,000 followers and are willing to advertise products on social media. Their lack of fame is one of the qualities that make them approachable. When they recommend a shampoo or a lotion or a furniture brand, their word seems as genuine as advice from a friend. In exchange for free products or a small commission, nanos typically say whatever companies tell them to.”

GM secretly gathered data on radio listening habits

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Every minute for three months, GM secretly gathered data on 90,000 drivers’ radio-listening habits and locations. (BoingBoing)

On September 12th, GM’s director of global digital transformation Saejin Park gave a presentation to the Association of National Advertisers in which he described how the company had secretly gathered data on the radio-listening habits of 90,000 GM owners in LA and Chicago for three months in 2017, tracking what stations they listened to and for how long, and where they were at the time; this data was covertly exfiltrated from the cars by means of their built-in wifi.

The company says it never sold this data, but the presentation to the advertising execs was clearly designed to elicit bids for it. Toyota has promised not to gather and sell telematics data, but GM seems poised to create a market in data gathered by your car, which can listen to you, follow you, take pictures of you and your surroundings, and even gather data on which passengers are in the car at different times by tracking Bluetooth beacons from mobile devices.

GM looked at station selection, volume and ZIP codes of vehicle owners. No radio in The Truck. Too noisy to listen if there were.

Yellow Pages

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A friend of mine — a local small businessman — called me yesterday saying he was “taking a poll.”

FRIEND: When was the last time you looked up a phone number in the Yellow Pages?
ME: Uh, at least ten years ago. Everybody uses Google, don’t they? Why are you asking?
FRIEND: I got a call from a sales rep for the Yellow Pages asking me to renew my ad. I told him I didn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong. I’ve been paying a thousand bucks a year for the last ten years. When I asked my wife she said, “We’d always had an ad so…”

A few years ago I was in the front yard when a guy pulled up and tossed a plastic bag on my lawn. It contained copy of the Yellow Pages. I picked it up and took it over to the guy saying I didn’t want it and always just throw them in the trash.

“Yeah, that’s what everybody tells me but I get paid to toss ’em. I can’t take it back so just pitch it,” he explained. I’d love to know how many people with ads in the YP are like my friend.

During my radio days (1970’s) I noticed one of our advertisers had been running the same ad for over a year. I started nagging our sales rep to go see the client and get some fresh copy. We’d produce a new spot, no charge.

“I think we just just let well enough alone. He’d tell us if he wanted to change copy,” whined the sales rep.

I kept after him and one day he stormed into my office. “I hope you’re happy! He cancelled his advertising!” And stormed out. I called the client to ask why.

“We had no idea we were still running that spot — and paying for it. My bookkeeper just wrote the check every month. It slipped through the cracks.”

I’ll bet the Yellow Pages folks have reams of data “proving” who uses the book and how often.

‘There’s Nothing Better Than a Scared, Rich Candidate’

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“Put the right images on the screen and the right words in the script, and all the candidate has to do is read the lines. Politicians aren’t leaders—they’re interchangeable products to be packaged and sold.”

“The Republican pollster John McLaughlin, who told then–House Majority Leader Eric Cantor he was leading his 2014 primary by 34 points shortly before he lost, had a track record of giving clients bad information. McLaughlin still gets hired today.”

“The vast majority of presidential elections […] can be forecast based on the state of the nation’s economy and the approval rating of the sitting president.”

Molly Ball, The Atlantic

People are deleting advertising from their lives

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“People are deleting advertising from their lives. Many simply don’t like or want it and now for the first time they have a choice in the matter. With the shift to streaming, the so-called ‘millennial’ has abandoned linear TV and, in turn, the ads that grace it. Higher-income consumers are more able to afford an ad-free existence by paying subscriptions for ad-free service experiences such as YouTube Red, Hulu+, or Spotify. This further erodes the pool of young, upwardly-mobile consumers that the ad industry so covets. In the future, only older, poorer people will experience advertising.”

And those ads you “see” online?

“A display ad is considered as ‘viewed by the visitor’ if “at least 50% of its pixels were displayed on the visitor’s browser for at least one continuous second.”

The Ad Industry’s Existential Crisis

Humans out at advertising agency

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Marketing communications firm (plans) “to utilize technology-based resources such as software, virtual robots, and media algorithms to create and implement advertising and marketing programs for its clients.” Excerpts below from The Ad Contrarian:

”We will need to keep a few tech people on staff to insure that our systems are functioning well and are properly integrated. But that’s it. Last-century resources like account managers, copywriters, art directors, and media planners — in other words, people — will be replaced by digital resources.”

”We have developed what we call ‘virtual robotics’ that can actually understand a client brief when it is converted into code via a proprietary algorithm we have developed. The robot program then goes online and hunts down previously created advertising and marketing campaigns in similar categories which it ‘borrows’ from — much like a traditional creative team does,” he explained.

I wrote a lot of radio commercials (we called them “spots”) over the years and while I wrote a few good ones, many were of grind-it-out-get-it-on-the-air variety. Yeah, I can imagine software doing those as well as I did.

The people formerly known as advertisers

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Media researcher Gordon Borrell says “we’ve reached the end of the Golden Age of Advertising.”

  • 82% of SMBs have established their own media channel in the form of a website or social media page.
  • Since 2007, spending has skyrocketed to the point at which businesses last year spent 72% more on marketing services and promotions than they had spent 10 years earlier. Meanwhile, the annual expenditure on local advertising was 22% less than it was a decade ago.
  • “Over the next 12 months, the gap will almost certainly widen to the point that all traditional advertising channels — print, broadcast, outdoor and mail — begin to look like niche support mechanisms to a local businesses’ digital marketing plan.”

Chase Apple Pay ad with Bleachers

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“The ad — in which Apple was heavily involved according to AdAge — follows members of an indie band as they prepare for a show by making purchases with their Chase Freedom card through Apple Pay. One gets a haircut, for instance, while another has his guitar tuned.”

My first thought on watching this ad was, “Pretty cool for a bank.” Upon closer look I saw that Apple was “heavily involved” so… Wonder if someone at Chase went to Apple and said help us make this cool, or if Apple reached out to Chase and said why don’t you let us make this cool for you.

Been using Apple Pay here at The Coffee Zone for a week now and it reminds me a bit of using my key fob to unlock the MINI. When I approach my car I just automatically click the unlock button. When I approach cash registers, will I reach for my phone without thinking?