




 
Search
|
|
As Advertisers race to cover every available surface,
are they DRIVING US INSANE?
Carrie McLaren | Issue #18
Its July 12, 2000. A rocket bearing Pizza Huts logo launches
into space. And that evening, on NBCs Nightly News, a wide-eyed
advertising exec is telling the nation about an exciting new ad medium.
Not the ad stickers on bananas (so 1996). Not the slogans imprinted on
beach sands (ditto). Not the cell phone pitches on tabletops, or the sailing
billboard, or the Volkswagon "autowraps," which can turn your
everyday car into an advertising vehicle. No, shes talking aboutget
this!elevator commercials. Thats television in the elevator!
Therell be no more agonizing wait on the lift to the office. "People
actually miss their floors," enthuses the rep. "They get so
engrossed in the story!"
Chances
are, however, that the people shes referring are advertisers and
their clients. Most humans, even those who loved the Chihauhau, are markedly
less thrilled about the prospect of yet another new ad medium. People
approach these ads in one of two ways: either by ignoring them, or making
a game of it by trying to figure out what could possibly be next. Ads
on toilets? Gas pumps? Rooftops? The vertical edges of stair steps? Considering
ads already adorn all the above, it is essentially a game of no contest.
Perhaps the only real challenge would be to find spaces without
advertising. Credit cards, ATM receipts, sports stadiums, hotel keys,
even the bottom of the each hole on the golf courseno space is left
unscathed.
Naturally, advertisers arent limited by physical surfaces (or
lack thereof). Broadcast Team in Ormond Beach, Florida, specializes in
telemarketing geared to answering machines. The company hires celebrities
to record a pitchDick Clark for American Music Awards; Michael Bolton
for his new albumwhich is then left as a "personal" message:
"Hi, this is Dick Clark. Im sorry to reach you at home, but
I just wanted to call your attention to a television special . . ."
Nor are advertisers constrained by laws. "Street blimps"
(large, flat, billboards-on-wheels) drive around cities such as Manhattan,
despite ordinances banning them. Companies spraypaint ads on sidewalks
and streetposts, and indulge in equally illegal "wild posting."
The fines paid by transgressorsusually a fraction of what legit
advertising costsare prefigured in the budget. Last year, Reebok
painted over 200 "mini-billboards" on sidewalks in downtown
Manhattan. The company was required to pay only $11,000 in cleanup costs.
By comparison, advertising on 200 phone booths during that period would
have cost over $400,000.
The catch-all trade term for such new new advertising is "ambient,"
or, as the British call it, the "pavement and urinals" category.
Although it has been around for decades, the category has exploded in
recent years. And this year is expected to be the biggest yet, with promises
of canned fragrances (Digicents "Snortal," touted as "the
worlds first scent-enabled Web portal") and Radio Shacks
sponsorship of a robot on the moon.
Advertisers cite several reasons for the explosion of ambient. Soaring
network television rates coupled with declining audiences (particularly
generations X and Y) and increased competition from internet and cable
outlets have made it difficult to blanket a brand message like the old
days. A booming economy fueled with dot-com money added to the ad glut.
And the desire to microtarget people at precisely timed moments all make
ambient the "it" form.
What these explanations miss, however, is that the forces behind
ambient are inherent in the advertising process. Advertising works somewhat
like bacteria: After its hosts (consumers) are exposed, they become immune,
so new strains of ads must develop and grow. These new strains are quickly
copied, adding clutter, requiring new strains to emerge. Over time, advertising
clutter leads to diminishing returns for individual campaigns. The more
advertising grows, the more it must grow. The cycle accelerates
and what was formerly considered unethical, offensive, or gauche is gradually
mainstreamed out of necessity.
Take bathrooms for example. When Zoom Media, a company that places
advertising in restaurant and club bathrooms, launched ten years ago,
the category faced "the toilet syndrome"no company wanted
to promote its brand near the crapper. The promise of reaching a captive,
targeted audience eventually made converts, though. While Zooms
revenues in 1991 totaled $40,000, that figure grew to $12 million in 1999.
Perhaps the most significant growth, however, is the form the ads take.
Initially limited to posters on stall doors and walls, bathroom advertising
has gone hi-tech with CD-ROMs and audio. The content of these ads has
likewise become more, uh, ambitious. A new ABC-TV campaign speaks to men
through the urinal, telling jokes like: "Oh my God, look at the size
of that thing! and "Hey, watch your shoes!" A recent
mens room campaign for Kozmo advises, "That Girls a bitch.
Why dont you go home and rent a movie?"
Similarly, ads have spread to territories formerly kept in check
by some vestige of ethics: school buses and textbooks, historical monuments,
doctors offices, even whole cities. Sacramento, California, calls
its corporate sponsorship plan "Capital Spirit." In Manhattan,
trees along 23rd Street are adorned with Old Navy logos. Its no
surprise, then, that "ambient" advertising is also known as
"ad creep," a word that single-handedly suggests both advertisings
growth and its creators. And though the term, like ambient, is new, its
roots run deep.
In 1759, Samuel Johnson wrote in The Idler that "Advertisements
are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused." This
was over a century before anything that could be considered an advertising
industry existed, but almost as soon as it did (by the 1910s and 20s)
ad men warned of "saturation" or what is now called "clutter."
The key difference between then and now is that, formerly, the media used
by advertisingnewspapers, radio, televisionwere commonly understood
to be public goods. Ad men felt obligated (if only out of legal concerns)
to keep public interests in mind. The new breed of ad "creatives"
are not nearly so encumbered, giddily promoting their ability to reach
a "captive audience" with "forced media."
Incidentally, said selling point also happens to be one of main problems,
as critics see it: people cant get away from this stuff. In April
2000, Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert, sent a letter to ad agencies
inquiring: "Do you recognize any place to be off-limits to advertising?
In your view, where should your industry draw the line?" He received
no response. Advertisers have the freedom to advertise, apparently, but
you arent free to avoid it.
Not that you would want to. To hear the marketers tell it, advertising
is a gift, relieving you of the agony of a reflective moment, that fifteen
seconds of waiting for your cash at the ATM. The Outdoor Advertising Association
of American calls billboards the "art gallery of the roadways and
the theater of the streets." (The same organization once published
a study showing that billboards improve safety by preventing driver "mild
disorientation" and "excessive fantasy formation.")
Advertisers insist the response to ambient ads is "tremendous"
(Zoom Media), "overwhelmingly positive" (beachnbillboard.com),
that ambient ads are "hot and chic . . . cool and hip" (Starcom
Worldwide), and that criticisms are minimal: a few grumpy ATM customers
here and there. At the same time, they recognize that ad fatigue is real.
People are said to see upwards of 3,000 ads a day, and tuning out most
of them is necessary to stay functional. The Wall Street Journal reported
that following a Coca-Cola-sponsored racing event that was littered with
Coke signs, giant inflatable Coke bottles, and a Coke logo covering the
middle of the race track, only one-third of the attendees could name Coke
as the sponsor.
Advertising is, to some extent, a victim of its own success. And
to maintain the same level of success, it evades public criticism by rendering
that criticism mootby blanketing the environment so that there is
no escape. In so doing, ambients biggest impact may, ironically,
be the most invisible. In the same way that advertising determines what
people will or wont see on the news, ambient advertisers aim to
control what they will or wont see outside, at work, or wherever.
Far from shying away from this dystopic vision, corporations embrace
it. Compac chose ATMs and elevators for its recent "Non Stop"
ad campaign because, according to one spokesman, "We wanted to send
a message that were everywhere, that were unstoppable."
A guerrilla campaign for CFRB, a Toronto talk radio station, was
even more direct. CFRBs ad agency Roche Macaulay & Partners
Advertising told Strategy, "We wanted [the campaign] to become
part of the cityscapea universal thing like homelessness and crime
that everyone has an opinion about." So Roche Macaulay blanketed
Toronto with signs bearing such questions as: "How far away do you
think the nearest crack house is?" and "Could you live on this
street corner for a week?" After at least one billboard drew angry
calls from residents, Roche Macaulay cheered. Apparently, when people
complain, it shows theyre awake and consciously viewing the brand.
Even better than merely saturating the environment is getting people
to interact with it. Floorgraphics, a company that places "adhesive
billboards" on grocery store floors, designed a "Got Milk?"
ad to look like a puddle of spilt milk, complete with an actual milk carton
lying on its side. Unwitting supermarket shoppers would hunt down store
employees to point out the "hazard."
Such tactics may seem innocuous (even funny) as isolated incidents;
the problems are only apparent when ads are multiplied by thousands and
constantly force-fed to the public.
"Theres a negative correlation between all that advertising
hoopla and interesting ideas we can create ourselves," says longtime
Village Voice ad columnist Leslie Savan. Incessant advertising,
she adds, "drains us and depresses our ability to think that life
can be fun and interesting outside of what corporate culture brings. Its
as if the color has drained out of our brains onto the signs on the floor."
With this in mind, maybe the future of advertising calls for a new
game. As Savan suggests, our minds and spirits are the ultimate media
for sale. Left unchecked, ad glut will only worsen, and any downtime people
have in between absorbing media messages will be defined as waste. Thus,
rather than measuring ad growth by fruit stickers and gas pumps, we should
start looking at IQ points and pulse rates. Once every conceivable surface
has been taken, advertisings growth can come only at the expense
of our own.
|