STOP THE PRESSES: Ad effectiveness waning!

A lot of hand-wringing (and elbow-bending, no doubt) has been going on this week down in Miami at the 2004 management conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. They're concerned because a survey they commissioned through Yankelovich Partners says (shock!) that effectiveness of advertising conducted by agencies for their clients is, as the New York Times says, "deteriorating." I found out about this in an NYTimes article.

Well knock me over with a feather. Who knew? The world is polluted with advertising and nobody wants to be bothered with all the jabbering insanity that gets pushed at you everywhere, including public rest rooms? Really? Good thing they commissioned a study. Something has to be done about this untimely shift in the zeitgeist.

Still, advertising is an essential element in our consumer world. And, let's be honest about it, we -- in North America -- are CONSUMERS first. So, the challenge that these agencies have is to make less advertising more meaningful to more people. They've tried one-to-one, interactive, and all the rest with serial limited success. Probably because each of these efforts assumes that the consumer is a moron requiring spoon-fed persuasion to both know about and then know what's good for him/her.

This mindset leads to the old-school form of carpet-bomb advertising. Broadcast the message far and wide, keep the CPM low and the GRPs high, concuss the market until some part of it surrenders by buying the product or service. Of course, the more progressive and worldly approach of the MBA-trained advertiser is to "target" the market. Targeting is kind of the same thing as carpet-bombing except that the geography to be covered is more concentrated what with the advertiser focused on only that part of the market ("segment") that has a high probability for surrender.

Not to get too technical, but targeting happens in a number of ways. For instance, advertisers can target through choice of battlefield media: only those media that the high-probability customer will see. The benefit for the rest of us is that we aren't forced to hear/see these ads. They can also target with creative content by making the message only interesting to certain demographics (age and income stereotypes) and psychographics (belief-based age and income stereotypes). This form of targeting doesn't have the same benefit to the rest of us because we too have to endure these ads. Fortunately, because we don't like the smell of this cheese, we can avoid the trap. But, that doesn't help with the advertisign pollution and its general ineffectiveness.

Targeting is an exercise that can be pushed to a redutio ad absurdum. The result is CRM and one-to-one marketing: i.e., a target of ONE! Good in theory, not so good in practice -- at least this far.

Through all of this from broadcast to narrowcast, shotgun to rifle, general to specific, the bottom line is MORE advertising volume less advertising effect. It's simple physics.
Hey, I've got an idea: maybe it's not the methods but the mindset?!? This notion captures about a line's worth of content in the Times article. Think about it though: Consumers are expressing a desire to control what and with whom they communicate. That means they want privacy, meaningful communication, and the right to decide how and when they communicate about things that are meaningful to them. The technique is largely secondary. I'm not going to tread over this ground because it's a been well fallowed by the Cluetrain boys.
I don't have an answer -- at least not that I'm willing to share here and now -- but at least I understand that the symptoms being worried about are not the real disease.

Posted by Grayson at April 16, 2004 07:55 AM