One thing I can't help but notice on this site is that while there are a few people talking about finding advertising for a business they no longer have or otherwise talking about the past by bringing up past experiences that are no longer relevant. As stated in a previous post the head of the Association of National Advertisers has gone on record to express extreme dismay and dissappointment in the advertising world and he points to the lack of creativity in his field. That creativity level continues to drop as the money goes and as the business picks up the least qualified college graduates. Students that have the best grades are moving forward to other much more lucrative fields and the power and prowess of advertising further erodes.
According to the Center for Literacy in the Media (yes, we are at the point where we need them) we are at a point now that advertisers should have seen coming long ago and should have adapted. It now appears that the advertising industry is a debacle that is killing itself.
Advertising is much less powerful than advertisers and critics of advertising claim, and advertising agencies are stabbing in the dark much more than they are practicing precision microsurgery on the public ccnsciousness. Advertising agencies would often have you believe that their expertise is not in creativity, but in getting airtime for less and using their profound knowledge to help place the advertising strategically. They fail at that. And they've been failing at it for generations.
One of the more striking examples concerns television advertising for the 1984 Olympics and the 1985 Superbowl. The naïve observer must assume that businesses reap extraordinary rewards for their elaborate and expensive sponsorship of these events. But, it turns out, no one really knows if they do. Video Storyboard Tests, Inc., a market-research firm, found that Olympics advertising was not cost-effective. Leading Olympics advertisers paid $62 for every 1,000 retained impressions" (consumers who report that they remember an ad or have retained impressions" of the ad) compared to the $27 they normally spend for the same result through other media such as magazines. As for the Super-bowl, some firms were pleased to advertise. Soloflex, a mail-order exercise firm, advertised because, as the firm's president put it, "Look, it's the Superbowl [Advertising ~on the game] gives the company more credibility; it's a statement that we have arrived." In actuality, the most commonly held beliefs about advertising, including its ability to influence sales by causing consumers to think a certain way about a product, are open to question. And those questions are now much more important than they were just a few years ago. Isn't it better to do what is best based on some amount of data-supported evidence, instead of impulse stupidity that is based on nothing but a sixth grade mentality.
It does seem that while advertising doesnn't often help very much, that they are these very indirect claims that some people believe in enough that they can't accept the facts. When advertising fails miserably, some companies are in denial...even to the point that the business is on the hope system. In this way only, it may be that advertisements indirectly affect consumer buying decisions because the companies politics have been built around a false system. Still the whole thing is a house of cards built fraud by the ad industry.
If business people think ads affect consumers directly, their belief serves as a spur to an advertising program. Yes, sometimes ignorance is bliss. A marketing executive at a major food company told me, for example, that he thinks most of the money spent by his own company on advertising does little good in convincing consumers of anything. However, he has failed in efforts to limit the advertising budget. Why? When the company executives make presentations before meetings of their stockholders or others in the investment community, the first thing investors want to see is a reel of the company's television advertisements. Expensive, well-executed, and familiar ads convince the investors, as nothing in the black and white tables of assets and debits can, that the company is important and prosperous. This, naturally, can have major consequences for the firm. If investment in advertising keeps the firm's investors happy, the company can count on a flow of capital for its operations. In this way, the investors' belief that advertising is an index of a prosperous company helps make the company prosperous.
This self-fulfilling prophecy" also works with a company's own sales force, distributors and retailers. A salesperson finds it easier to say "I'm selling Proctor and Gamble," rather than "I'm selling Product X you probably haven't heard of it.' And retailers prefer to stock well-advertised goods because they THINK consumers are influenced by advertising. As a result, widely advertised brands become the brands most widely available. Consumers confirm the supposed influence of advertising by picking the brands off the shelf. It is entirely plausible, then, that advertising helps sell goods even if it never persuades a consumer of anything. So long as investors, salespeople, and retailers believe that advertising affects consumers, advertising will influence product availability and this, by itself, shapes consumer choice. Availability, as marketers sometimes say, equals sales. When the vulnerability of semi-professionals is varied, we all start to see the problems. Mediocrity is rewarded and the flawed reward process becomes an abortion. Of course, small businesses in particular can't tolerate traditional old boy politics that amount to wasted revenue and unenlightened business sense. We can't afford to advertise just because it may be fun to talk about it or say to sponsor a Nascar team because we can all get away on the weekends. We have to get smart.
The question we need to ask is not whether advertising works but under what conditions it works. Ii should not be forgotten that numerous sources of information influence consumers' decisions to buy. The business world is a big wobbly ball that is affected by so many things that any one person or advertising campaign can accurately see a result. In this way it is very much like our economy. It is our economy. Also the problem is compounded as the consumer gets smarter and more immune from the lies we see every day in advertising. In the best of times, even when our economy was young and people started making the transition from the farm to a new consumer driven worlds, advertising was still just one one of many influences on consumer decisions. This changes completely in certain circumstances, however. The lower class is the most vulnerable to advertising.
Some consumers sometimes and all consumers under some circumstances are deprived of alternative information sources and are more dependent on and more vulnerable to advertising. This is the case with children, with people in transitional states in their lives and with Third World peoples relatively new to the world of mass-marketed consumer goods and less protected by government agencies and regulations. (Of course, this means that most of the planet's people fall in this category.) But not Americans. It's hard to make this point too strongly: Different groups are differentially vulnerable to advertising; and their vulnerability varies not so much with the character or quantity of advertisements as with claim by age, education, station in life and government guarantees of consumer protection. As the world gets smarter, and for example people know much more about shopping for cars today than even ten or even five years ago. The same is true of real estate. Salespeople look for the dumb guy in overalls and a pocketfull of cash for the "lay down sale". The same is also true of advertising agencies. They are looking for large budgets and sometimes distracted companies. That is also true in the smallest markets, where I could write a book about the horror stories. The current thinking among salespeople (and even their managers) is to not to have too much contact with the advertiser...or he may think too much about it and cancel. There are groups ready to further legislate against inaccurate advertising and to offer protection for at special risk (minors. for instance) for high vulnerability. There is more constitutional room to restrict advertising to young people, and the burden of proof to show that advertising affects behavior should be correspondingly lighter. I personally think as the industry quickly erodes to a skeleton of its former self, that the idea will go away and the problem (if there is one) will go away. But there is hatred out there for advertisers that includes periodic product boycotts. It seems that advertising's message isn't nearly as strong as that of the news media, which shapes people's basic concepts of how the world operates and what kinds of lives are worth living. Viewing an advertisement that comes and goes and is an adjunct of another activity is much less powerful experience than a conscious, willed, long-term activity like reading a novel. The bottom line is that advertising is losing its luster and we can see it every day. I was our and about today and experienced first hand several examples of ineffective advertising without seeing any examples of effective advertising. At Walgreen's drug store I tried to buy some low dose aspirin that was on sale for four dollars and something. At least I thought it was. It rang up to over five dollars, despite the sign that said four-something. The clerk made calls, walked around the store looking for a circular. The clerk got others looking as well. They were still looking when she was finally told many disruptive minutes later that the huge sign right in front of the pharmacy counter was two months old and that the sale ended almost eight weeks ago. No one knew. No one bought the aspirin. No one asked. Even that huge sign and the circular hadn't worked. Who knows where else they may have advertised that. (I didn't buy anything after that) My friends and I spent the morning trying to find out why our local university advertised a lecture on religion yesterday which didn't take place as scheduled last night. The University didn't know and wasn't helpful, even though it was on their internet site, a pamphet and the newspaper. Apparently there was no lecture because they were supposed to advertise a class with three meetings instead, but the class doesn't start for several months. We don't know what happened, but at this point I wasn't suprised. Everything advertised seems to be an abortion. There is such a huge disconnect. Don't get me started with the other advertising miscues I've experienced today, regarding a major airline, a Dallas Hotel and a travel club. All I have to do is sit back and observe and I see it everywhere...and I often see an inverse reaction on Wall Street to companies that advertise the most.
Hyundai tells us that their cars make sense, Apple Computer offers us the power to be our best, and most of us don't believe a word of it. The fact is, when all is said and done, most people don't believe, don't remember, don't even notice, most advertising. This has always been so and always will be so. The vast majority of advertising is ineffective and inefficient.
Greater awareness of advertising's role in your life can help make you a conscious, instead of an automatic, consumer: For the advertising industry, along with the main body of industrial society, is struggling for survival. It may be drowning, but it has not yet sunk. And in a last-ditch effort to save itself, it will flail about more wildly and make more noise than ever, as we might expect from any drowning individual.
As I stated earlier there are groups actively campaigning against companies that advertise and are supporting those that don't. Just for laughts, this is what one has stated on their website. It just shows how unresponsive many people are about ad campaigns in general.
Don't be a walking advertisement.
Remove those labels, tags and other symbols from your jeans and steer clear of T-shirt advertising, "alligator" shirts and clothing with designer logos. Why should you be an unpaid billboard?
Keep your counter clear of brand names.
Whenever possible, transfer liquid soaps, cereals, cookies, nuts, juices and the like from their brand-identified store-bought containers into plain, general-purpose jars and cannisters. Or remove brand I.D. labels from store containers (but make sure the product is still clearly identifiable).
Take the road less traveled.
Avoiding main highways and using local streets can help you sidestep the major arteries and commercial avenues in your locale. This will go a long way towards reducing your exposure to outdoor advertising and may even help you get to know your town or city a little better.
Reduce or eliminate junk mail.
Department stores and local merchants will stop sending you flyers and other advertising if you ask them to. Many local direct-mail associations will also serve as clearinghouses for a request to eliminate junk mail. Check your phone directory for local listings or write to the national organization, Junk Mail Busters, Ste. 5038, 4 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, CA 94111.
Divest your possessions of brand names.
Applicances, stereo components, computers, TV sets, tele-phones, sometimes even furniture almost all display prominent logos, but you don't have to live with them. Often you can cover them with tape or water-soluble colors, unscrew them or peel them away without damaging the item. (When resale value and slight damage are not concerns, you can obliterate them.)
Keep your branded items hidden.
Store toothpastes in the medicine cabinet, detergents out of sight and return everyday foods or other frequently-used items that can't be transferred to alternate containers to cabinets immediately after use.
Recently (true story) a journalist wrote a book on the downfall of advertising and stated that he was involved in three losing industries. You'll never completely get rid of advertising, but you'll think of many ways to spend less on it. And you may find your business thrives because of it.
