ONGOING PROJECTS / THESIS / INTRODUCTION - 1.The WAR

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THE WAR

“The bottom line is that the marketing
communication world is in disarray.”
Joseph Jaffe, Life After the 30-Second Spot

Hey, fellow advertiser. Yes, you, red-eyed, with horn-rimmed glasses and a black turtleneck. Can you pitch a product to a god? It can't be easy when even the mortals go out of their way to avoid us.

The remote control, that sword of consumer Damocles, has been hanging over our collective head for over half a century now. When the Lazy Bones first appeared in the 1950s, the technology was advertised (what an irony) as an ad silencer. What did we do? We set up road blocks by scooping up chunks of air time across all channels to keep the surfers bumping into our commercials they were so actively trying to dodge.

The ultimate ad-skipping technologies – the refrigerator, the microwave and the bathroom – have invited a similarly ungraceful backlash. We are single-handedly responsible for one of the largest and potentially most dangerous urban phenomena, the Super Flush, the massive splash of advertising dollars going down the drain when all Super Bowl fans head to the bathroom. Our response? Turning the volume up and slinging the ads within earshot of our flushing and corn-popping audience.

As the remote control mutates and proliferate, our countermeasures follow a predictable path of making the ads louder, more intrusive and more omnipresent. The success of these measures has been unsurprisingly low and has resulted in more anger than brand loyalty on the part of the audience whom we try to make loyal in the first place.

The advertisers are frustrated because their forecasts show that the situation is not about to improve; the first random study that popped up on Google predicts that DVR adoption will grow at 47 percent a year through 2008. (2) Most of the current research points out that anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of DVR owners skip commercials. What are we going to do about it? Slap banners right in the middle of the screen when TiVo goes into its fast-forward mode, that's what.

When AT&T in 1994 launched its first banner on HotWired, it was exotic, exciting and effective. The interest quickly faded, and we rushed to gussy it up with pretty colors and animations. That was fun for a while, but then people turned away and got back to their business. We upped the ante once again, and came up with even, we thought, more exciting technologies – exit windows, interstitials, roll-ons, roll-ups, pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-all-over-the-place. The very TV spots people were trying to zap on TV, we began to stream online. We turned the volume up, too, embarrassing office surfers who scrambled for the "mute" button and deafening everyone in their headphones.

We were the only ones excited. People responded in kind. First, they would politely click on the "x" button to get rid of the mini windows jumping up in their faces. Then they created a pop-up blocker. Then the pop-up blocker became a standard feature in all browsers. Then they learned how to block animations. When that didn’t help, they began to block off the entire ad servers. Now they’ve come up with Grease Monkey, a technology that automatically strips every single ad on a web page before it is even loaded.

The war is on, and we are losing it. And this is one war we don’t even need to be fighting.

We love our audience, but it is only our fault if no one can tell. Instead of being a gentle and loyal lover, a prince charming always ready to help, never a nuisance, we collectively act like a paranoid stalker, obsessively collecting and fetishizing every little thing our audience leaves behind. We call our audience at nights and breathe heavily into the phone, or read a sloppily written script. We deluge their mail boxes with letters. We jealously guard our audience’s every move; god forbid that the audience ever turns away from us. We demand undivided attention. Like an insecure teenager, we shout obscenities, mistaking disdain for interest. In an act of desperation, we parade naked bodies. We burp and fart, and insult our audience’s intelligence. We doubt their sexual endurance and are never satisfied with their breast size. We criticize the cars they drive, the clothes they were, their cooking, parental and gardening skills. We scoff at their education, habits and tastes. Even our pick-up lines are so worn out that a simple "may I buy you a drink" would sound excitingly fresh.

We pay for their entertainment and then demand certain favors in return.

We generally mean well, though, and sometimes people even love us back. On those bright days, they laugh at our jokes, answer our calls, forward our emails, and buy our stuff. They say they never watch ads on TV, but cheer the reruns of the old ones. They say they hate ads in newspapers but diligently cut out coupons. They say they can't stand ads on the DVDs they buy, but rewind the movie trailers. They pay for glamour magazines that are 90 percent ads. They keep their Yellow Pages tomes nearby. They collect fridge magnets. They wear our logos. They tattoo our names on their skin. They are saying how they despise advertisers, yet Boston’s section of Craig's List hosts some 150,000 ads they themselves have posted in the recent month. Then Google launched their AdSense and suddenly they are reading self-help books on how to boost click-throughs.

We love them. They, it turns out, are not ruling us out of their lives either. Why can’t we do the right thing and fix this relationship from dysfunctional into thriving? Sometimes we don’t know what the right thing would be. Sometimes we do, but the system won’t let us do what’s right.

The first part is easy. All we really need to know we already learned in the kindergarten. Reading the Cluetrain Manifesto helped, too. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Look. If you want to talk to somebody, have something interesting to say. Follow the path of the least resistance. Be on time. We would be better off even if we followed our own slogans. Think different. Be inspired. Be yourself for a while. Try harder. Just do it. Some advertising gurus say the business of advertising should not be confused with the business of entertainment. They were proven wrong by the millions who downloaded BMW films and then went to the dealerships to test-drive the car. Others say dry info doesn’t sell. They were proven wrong by the spectacular rise of Google, a company whose entire business is to mediate the sales of dry ads, 95 characters at a time. The entire books of advertising wisdom can be summed up in one sentence: "Whatever you have to say, say it to the people who are interested at the time that suits them best in a way that will keep them listening."

We are also prisoners of the media system we ourselves helped to set up. It all started quite innocently:

"Consider broadcasting. In its infancy, it was a reflexive instrument, a tool for selling radio sets. But broadcasting's real birth might more accurately be dated to the Postum Co.'s 1926 order that its Philadelphia advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, relocate to New York, the developing center of the broadcast-network business, to handle the account of its Jell-O division. Within eight years, that move bequeathed to the listening public "The Jack Benny Program," "Colgate House Party," "General Foods Cooking School" and a smattering of other audience-delighting radio programs." (3)

The very medium that we hoped would bring us closer to the people has grown into a risk-averse behemoth that is cute to look at but is harder to teach new tricks than the proverbial old dog. The 30-second spot that everyone is so willing to see dead that it just might as well die is not around because it does the job well – it is considered bad manners now to claim so in public. It is around because there is nothing to replace it, that is, nothing convenient and comfortably familiar.

People at Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment are among the few who are trying something unfamiliar and uncomfortable. In October 2005, WWE began shifting its live coverage to the web instead of cutting it off for commercial breaks. At least one analyst, a director of national broadcast for Initiative, immediately voiced a concern: “Now you're talking about telling the most rabid of fans to switch to another platform when advertisers are wanting to talk to them. It sets a dangerous precedent." (4)

Dangerous precedent? WWE may have just dealt a Hulk Hogan blow to ad skipping, single-handedly incapacitating the Super Flush, the DVR and the remote. Chris Chambers, WWE’s VP for interactive media, quoted a house study that showed 60 percent of the simultaneous TV and computer viewers not channel-surfing away during the commercial breaks. "If they weren't online, they'd probably go get a snack or go the bathroom. This way they're probably still in the same room and can hear the ads."

Instead of exploring the opportunities the DVR offers, we are trying to circumvent or break the fast-forwarding function. The DVR threatens the familiar and the comfortable. The DVR is bad. If we can’t kill the DVR, then we must at least cripple it.

Prohibitive transaction costs, technological limitations, red tape, shortage of research knowledge, insufficient infrastructure, broken communications, conflicting interests, or plain inertia both on our and media's side have perpetuated the tyranny of the existing delivery formats, even if these formats have been stretched to the breaking point.

Pop-up ads annoy consumers and freeze their computers and yet more money is poured into pop-ups. Spam renders entire email accounts useless and yet Gateway keeps sending me offers to buy a computer even though I have already bought one from them and have not expressed any interest in buying more. Nearly identical credit card offers from competing banks fill up mailboxes. It’s a vicious circle: the more cluttered the format, the more advertising is crammed in it. If there is a law of diminishing returns, it doesn’t seem anyone in advertising is aware.

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(2) "Study: DVR Adoption on The Rise", CNET, accessed online on Dec 20, 2005 at http://news.com.com/Study+DVR+adoption+on+the+rise/2100-1041_3-5182035.htmls

(3) Randall Rothenber, “The Advertising Century”, Advertising Age, accessed online on Dec.20, 2005 at http://www.adage.com/century/rothenberg.html

(4) James Hibberd, "Internet Ploy by USA 'Raw' Snubs Ads." TV Week, accessed online on Dec. 20, 2005 at http://www.tvweek.com/lockland.cms?articleId=28898