Tag Archives: advertising

“Instead of shouting the message, hide it”

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Will we still get carpet bombed by mindless 30 second commercials in the future? (And by future I mean a couple of weeks from now.) Seems unlikely, but how will savvy marketers reach –and more importantly– engage us? How do you “reach people who are so media-saturated they block all attempts to get through.”

Perhaps with alternate reality games (ARG’s). That’s the subject of a fascinating article by Frank Rose in this month’s Wired Magazine (Issue 16.01).

“The initial clue was so subtle that for nearly two days nobody noticed it. On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails’ European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled “i am trying to believe.” Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing “iamtryingtobelieve.com” into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site’s contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: “I’m drinking the water. So should you.” Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?”

I’m not a gamer. At all. But I love shit like this. Reminds me of the viral video snippets in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. The Wired article is well worth the read.

Advertiser Optimism by Medium

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From Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog:

"Advertiser Perceptions latest survey of 2,047 ad executives (published twice yearly) — as published by Online Media Daily — reveals growing pessimism among ad buyers about traditional forms of advertising. I view this study as significant, because it speaks directly with people who are making decisions about spending money."

Adforecast

Only newspapers face a smaller increase and larger decrease than radio? [Emphasis/red from original post]

1,000 $100 advertisers

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“Newspapers are losing their own core market because they didn’t understand the scale of the internet. They still thought mass when they should have realized that small is the new big. That is, online, newspapers still threw their lot in with the big advertisers who had been the only ones who could afford their mass products. They didn’t see the mass of potential spending in a new population of small, local advertisers who never could afford to advertise in newspapers but who now could afford to buy targeted, efficient, inexpensive ads online.”

“Even the online sales teams at newspaper companies didn’t how now to sell small; they were — as I once put it in a meeting — putting all their effort into saving the old $100,000 advertiser and saw getting 1,000 $100 advertisers as a distraction. The new-media divisions had already become big and old.” — Buzz Machine

Jeff Jarvis goes on to offer suggestions on how newspapers can generate new, local dollars online:

“Start a new company that makes small, local advertising its sole focus. That means they need to set up automated systems to accept and place highly targeted local ads and directories. That means they need to come up with new means of selling without on-the-street sales staffs: outbound phone sales, direct response, even local sales network (instead of citizen journalists, citizen sales people), making aggressive use of the promotional power of the newspaper while you still have it. That means they need to have lots of targeted local content without large editorial staffs.”

Most sales organizations with which I am familiar are just not wired for this. The math just doesn’t work. It will be interesting to see which traditional media companies are able to make their sales machine work in a New Online World.

Mass media advertising moving toward “mass personalization”

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One of our news directors forwarded a very interesting article by Graeme Newell, a “web marketing and revenue specialist” for 602 Communications. The article (“Hiding – The Latest Challenge in News Marketing”) touches on how social networks (My Space,Facebook, etc) will change (are changing?) how mass media advertising works (or does not work).

Mr. Newell explains how difficult it will be for companies to advertise and market to those who choose to communicate with only those on their “friends” list. That’s a gross oversimplification of one of the articles key points. Here’ are a few of my take-aways:

“Spam” will grow to include any message that does not come from a trusted source.
As consumers get more and more overwhelmed by the amount of communication in their lives, smart technology will help them prioritize and eliminate all the time wasters in their daily routine. These systems will filter TV ads, email, text messages, web interaction, phone messages and all other forms of personal communication. The trend will be that if I don’t know you, then I don’t want to talk to you.

Technology will seek to eliminate “interruption” advertising
There is an adage on the internet that if you obstruct the flow of information in any way, the community will not fight you, but simply go around you. You will quickly find yourself irrelevant. As technology gets better and better, tools will continue to arise that simply eliminate unwanted interruptions like mass advertising and promotion. Holding people hostage and forcing them to watch a non-targeted ad is not going to be tolerated in the future. The audience will demand that the ads they let in be customized to their individual tastes and desires.

Mass media advertising will move towards a system of “mass personalization.”
People want products in their lives that share their priorities, interests and values. As mass markets continue to splinter into ever more fragmented and specialized groups, consumers will expect advertisers to follow their lead. Technology will allow truly personalized ad communication with millions of people – all of it customized to the emotional and intellectual needs of the buyer.

Now that everyone (online) can –theoretically– reach everyone else, we realize we really only care about hearing from our friends (or select acquaintances). Social networks –augmented by technologies like text messaging– make it possible to do so.

If I ignore most of my email and rarely turn on a radio or TV (without the Tivo filter)… how will advertisers and marketers reach me?

I’m sorry I can’t link tot he full article. I can’t find it online but will keep searching.

IBM Report: “The End of Advertising as We Know It”

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Podcasting News points to a report compiled by IBM with the scary title: “The End of Advertising as We Know It.” I’m not sure what IBM knows about the state of advertising but they surveyed more than 2,400 consumers and 89 ad execs globally.

The report from Big Blue forecasts “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50.”

When I read stuff like this, I ask the men and women in our company (who sell a LOT of advertising) if they get a similar read and the answer is always, “Nope, everything is A-OK.” No changes on the horizon. Everything is hunky-dory.

Well, five years isn’t that long. We shall see what we shall see.

PS: Here’s one more graph from the report summary:

More than half of ad professionals polled by IBM expect that in the next five years open advertising exchanges (currently led by companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL) will take 30 percent of current revenues now commanded by traditional broadcasters and media. Nearly half of the advertising survey respondents anticipate a significant (greater than 10%) revenue shift away from the 30-second spot within the next five years, and almost 10 percent of respondents thought there would be a dramatic (greater than 25 percent) shift. Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.