Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bob Gilbreath is chief marketing strategistat Bridge Worldwide, one of the largest globaldigital ad agencies. He has worked withsome of the world’s largest marketers,including Procter & Gamble, Johnson &Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, and Ford. Hecurrently leads digital strategy work for clientssuch as Kroger, Abbott, Luxottica, andConAgra Foods. Bob was recognized by AdvertisingAge as one of the Top 50 Marketersof 2004. Bridge Worldwide headquarters arelocated in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF MARKETING

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

It's Everywhere, and It's Intrusive

Whether they're on pumps at the gas station, on turnstiles at the football stadium, or on the flanks of sheep grazing along highways in the Netherlands, it will come as a surprise to no one to learn that today's consumer is accosted by an average of 3,000 advertisements per day, at a cost to advertisers of more than $244 billion. In spite of our best efforts to achieve media saturation as a means of boosting sales—or, perhaps more accurately, because of those efforts—consumers have learned to ignore the majority of our marketing efforts at best, and at worst to hate them.

Think I'm exaggerating? The numbers don't lie. A survey jointly conducted by AdWeek and advertising agency J. Walter Thompson in 2007 revealed that 84 percent of people believe, "Too many things are over-hyped now." Another 72 percent admitted that they are "tired of people trying to ... sell me stuff." That's not hard to imagine, given the efforts that some companies are making to infiltrate even our most sacred spaces with advertising. A company appropriately called Mangia Media sells ad space on pizza boxes, connecting with consumers, "In their hands. In their homes" (italics not mine). Another company is selling ad space on floating displays alongside lakes and ocean beaches. Ah, the beauty of the great outdoors, brought to you by the Principal Financial Group.

Some industries are going so far as to use what they consider "innovative" advertising to keep their businesses afloat. Take the airlines. Airlines that are in trouble are using their captive audiences to generate advertising revenue from brands such as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and ING. At a time when the airlines are removing the free drinks and complimentary peanut packs from your tray table, they're slapping ads onto it. And if the white space on the baggage compartment doors, napkins, and airsickness bags is already taken, you can now buy space outside the window. A new start-up called Ad-Air has bought or leased $10 million in real estate next to landing strips and will sell you space in one of its 30 airport slots for $100,000 per month. A real estate company in Dubai was the first taker, placing a two-football-field-sized ad that broke the Guinness World Record for banner size. Even the Transportation Security Administration is getting in on the game by advertising on its plastic security bins.

Another business that is in trouble, network television, not only is taking advantage of its captive audience to advertise products and services during (widening) commercial breaks, but is increasingly utilizing the unused physical space during programming with none other than pop-up ads. "Snipes" is the actual name for these graphics, which creep onto the screen and into your peripheral vision as you attempt to enjoy whatever show you are watching. Lewis Black perhaps best represented the general viewing public's frustration with snipes in a three-minute rant during the Emmys in October 2007:

Your job is to tell stories; it's not to tell us in the middle of the story what show is coming on next or which one is premiering two weeks from now! What do you want me to do, stop and get a pencil and write it down?

Perhaps because of the all-time low ratings it received, Fox took things a step further when it aired the 2007 World Series between the Rockies and the Red Sox. In its broadcast of Game Two, at the bottom of the seventh inning, at a time usually reserved for the American ritual of stretching and singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," Fox announcer Joe Buck instead directed viewers to the giant high-definition screen on the DirecTV blimp for a special preview of the new season of 24.

The full blitz interruptive approach of traditional advertising is also catching on globally. BusinessWeek recently reported on the rise of 35-year-old entrepreneur Jason Jiang, a new advertising mogul in China who built a $6 billion company in five years by installing 190,000 advertising video screens in 90 cities. Like many people before him, Jiang discovered that there was money to be made by putting ad messages in front of a large, captive audience. Business is very good for Jiang, who is now worth $1.8 billion and counting, as global brands are vying for ad space on his network and bidding up the price in hopes of winning in the world's hottest economy. "'I am very hungry and ambitious,' says Jiang, who wants to put screens everywhere. 'I see a golden age for advertising.'" I suppose the 1 billion Chinese consumers should prepare for their 3 trillion ad impressions per day. Is this really the kind of cultural contribution we should be exporting?

It's Irrelevant, and It's Offensive

The problem isn't just that we are spamming people in countless ways; hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted every year on marketing that either misses its target audience completely or, worse, delivers a useless message to someone who might otherwise be compelled to purchase. When a woman with cats is interrupted by a commercial for dog food, or when a man is forced to stare at a tampon billboard while sitting in traffic, that's both a wasted buck and a wasted impression.

And it's not just that our ads hit the wrong people; even the "right," or targeted, consumers often find our ads irrelevant for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the creative output. One big reason for this is that interruption itself is irrelevant. When there's an abrupt break in the continuity of a particular activity, we're trained to look past the interruption and resume whatever it was we were doing, thinking, or watching before. A study conducted by Moshe Bar, director of the Visual Neurocognition Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, shows that when we force viewers to watch ads, we actually end up hurting our sales. According to Bar:

Cognitive psychology experiments have shown that when people have to ignore a stimulus on the way to achieving another goal, not only do they get annoyed, they end up really disliking the distraction. And this disliking is very specific to that stimulus. So, if I am interested in the latest Red Sox score, but am forced to watch a commercial for a new merlot first, chances are that I will develop an aversion to that very brand of merlot, which will create for the advertiser the opposite effect of what was intended.

Another reason that traditional ads have become irrelevant is that most of us are fairly set in our ways as far as our purchasing patterns are concerned. We are pretty much satisfied with the cars we're driving, the deodorant we're using, and the life insurance company we send checks to every month. Others may disagree with me, but I have found in my experience that no amount of one-sided selling and telling will break through a satisfied consumer's hardened mind until and unless he himself has experienced, firsthand, a real reason to change banks, toilet tissue, or dog food. And even then, it often takes more than one disappointing situation to motivate a person to spend the time and energy (yes, even changing brands of dog food generally requires a little bit of contemplation) to make the switch.

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