Marketing company Catalina Corporation places promotional coupons on the back of receipts at grocery stores. Advertising space is purchased on the side of the cereal box. In New York City, advertisements are placed on the roofs of taxis and on billboards around the ice rink during hockey games. Fox went so far as to sell the rights to a small space over the shoulder of the receiving player so that television viewers would see ads throughout the baseball game.
2. The second approach to advertising is even more dubious and at the same time funny. The Coca-Cola Company hired the CAA agency to recruit famous Hollywood directors to shoot in advertising for drinks. A magazine ad for Candies shoes(!) shows a woman sitting on a toilet. Spike Lee's advertising agency made more than $50 million last year from actor billing.[1]
Of course, the increase in attempts to get your attention is leading to further oversaturation of the advertising market. An advertiser who manages to beat a competitor at the moment has simply raised the bar. The ad that follows needs to be even more whimsical to keep the lead and keep the consumer's attention.
By the minute, the cost of producing a great TV commercial is much higher than the cost of producing a full-length Hollywood movie. Talking frogs, CGI, and good editing seem to be essential ad requirements these days.
The focus on entertainment has side effects. The marketer has less time for sales per se. Today, short advertising is growing in popularity as a way to capture the attention of consumers more often at a lower cost. In ads that run only fifteen seconds, ten or twelve are spent on attracting attention, and only a few moments are left for showing the logo and talking about the benefits of the product and calling for it.
Test the effectiveness of distraction advertising! Write down the names of all the companies whose ads you saw during yesterday's broadcast of your favorite television show. Write down the names of all the companies whose banners you came across during your last surfing the Internet. Companies paid a lot of money for placing banners on the Web. If you can remember more than 10 percent of the total, then you are unique.
3. A third way to keep mass marketing from dying is to change ad campaigns more frequently to maintain "interest and novelty." Tony the tiger, Charlie the tuna, the Marlboro cowboy - each of these trademarked characters has cost the company-creators billions of dollars. Over the past forty years, marketers have invested fabulous amounts of money in them so that each of the advertising characters is clearly associated with a specific brand.
On the other hand, Nike has placed a series of ads without the famous "tick" - probably one of the most successful logos of our time. Apple Computer changes its advertising slogan every year. Wendy's, McDonald's, and Burger King rush from one method to another in the hope of finding their Holy Grail that will give them consumer attention.
Marketers prefer long-term campaigns to build a well-known brand for the sake of brief moments of "recognition" (remember , what a hype arose when the main character, red-haired Mickey, was replaced on the box of Life breakfast cereals?). They are satisfied with this approach, since such are the requirements of distraction marketing - advertising cannot exist without attention.
4. The fourth and final way, just as powerful as the previous three, is that many marketers are moving away from advertising, replacing it with direct mail and direct promotion. Today, marketers allocate much more to direct mail and direct promotion than they used to — 52% of their annual advertising budget.
Of the $200 billion spent last year on consumer advertising in the US, more than $100 was spent on direct mail, in-store promotions, prize coupons, inserts and other non-traditional forms. Last year, Wunderman Cato Johnson alone generated more than $1.6 billion in billing revenue for its clients (such as AT&T).
Every time you receive a glossy Lexus catalog in the mail or enter an wine store, you are seeing the results of the direct marketing trend. To some extent, these methods are better at capturing the attention of consumers than advertisements, which is why advertisers use them. The effect of their use is easier to measure than the effect of the use of billboards. Their biggest selling point is that they give marketers another tool to gruel the grueling battle against ad congestion. After all, you find only 5-10 pieces of “waste paper” in your e-mail box every day, and not
