Television advertising as we’ve come to know it – the highly produced 30-second or 1-minute spot – is rapidly losing its effectiveness.
Yes, we still love to watch those Super Bowl ads to see what those clever folks on Madison Avenue will come up with next. However, there’s increasing evidence that they’re not selling products as well as they used to. A study from McKinsey & Co. predicts that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be only one-third as effective as it was in 2009.
In large part this is because of the explosive dominance of the Internet, which is causing a revolution in how people decide which products and services to buy. We’re becoming accustomed to being in charge of the narrative. “The Web is the biggest remote control ever invented,” writes blogger Gerry McGovern. “We can do whatever we want to do, whenever we want to do it. And we love it.”
“Most media used to be a kind of flow,” says marketer Lars Bastholm. “The reason advertising is completely broken is that the flow doesn’t exist anymore. Everyone’s composing their own flow.”
Of course, advertising will always be with us. The challenge is to revolutionize it to take advantage of the new, interactive reality.
Banner-ad Blindness
Right now, the biggest question is how to effectively advertise on the Internet. 87% of the respondents to a survey by Forrester Research said they were spending more ad dollars on the Internet in the coming year.
But how? One of the first attempts was the banner ad, in effect treating the computer screen like a page in a glossy magazine. However, eye-tracking research soon proved the existence of a new phenomenon, “banner-ad blindess.” No matter how bright the colors and how much the ad jumped around, people literally did not see it. They looked right through it, because it had nothing to do with what they were doing.
In the 2000s, the big winner in Internet advertising was Google, which created the best search engine ever, and then harnessed the tremendous energy that resulted to make a fortune selling small, plain, unobtrusive ads that spoke directly to what the visitor was doing. As McGovern writes, if he’s searching the Internet to rent an RV “and I see a list of RV companies in the right-hand column on Google, I don’t see that as advertising, I see it as helpful, useful.”
More recently, having amassed 150 million active users, Facebook has been selling pay-per-click advertising to highly targeted demographics. However, “Facebook advertising has some of the worst performance of any online ad format,” writes blogger Ben Kunz. “Target populations tend to be tiny,” and click-through rates average around 0.04%. A big part of the problem is that Facebook visitors aren’t there to buy stuff, they’re there to chat with their friends.
Facebook attempted to capitalize on its original concept by inviting visitors to make “friends” with businesses and then send links to their human friends, presumably creating Word of Mouth (WoM) buzz. The model failed. As one blogger pointed out, “In my book, WoM is when the person makes the recommendation for a brand in his/her own words (this is why it is authentic and credible) and NOT when they get used as a carrier pigeon to deliver the brand’s message.”
Switch of the Swoosh
The marketing trajectory of sports giant Nike has followed the evolution of its customers from passive viewers into active participants. In the 1980s, the company embarked on a series of expensive, high-profile ads featuring Michael Jordan, Spike Lee, Tiger Woods and the United States women’s soccer team. The campaign elevated the Nike “swoosh” brand to international fame.
A turning point came in 2005 when the company introduced its ID shoe, a design-it yourself shoe, with a series of 10 highly produced ads on MTV – and nothing happened. “We just didn’t see sales go up,” says Nike vice president Trevor Edwards. “It was just nothing. It was like we ran them, and waited, and nothing happened.” With content and activity proliferating on the Internet, sitting and watching a TV ad was losing its appeal.
Today Nike puts a large proportion of its marketing effort into the Internet, for example posting sports videos on You Tube, and using the Web in increasingly creative ways. If you’re a runner, for $29 you can buy a Nike+ sensor, put it in your running shoe, and track your run on an Apple iPod. When you get home, you can post the details of your run on the Nike+ web site, as well as have conversations with other runners, discuss different routes, and arrange to meet up in person. Of course, the Nike swoosh is there all along.
”It’s a very different way to connect to consumers,” who come to the site on an average of three times a week, says Edwards. “So we’re not having to go to them.”
Relevance and Authenticity
Writing in Business Week, Ben Kunz points out that there are three modes of using interactive media: receiving, hunting and doing. These roughly parallel the evolution of the Internet. In the beginning people were happy to just receive content, and marketers responded by trying to create “sticky” portals which people would return to, and stay there.
Soon the Internet grew huge, nobody could find anything, and hunting mode took over, led by Google.
Now social media have created a large online space where people go to do things. “Internet users can create, contribute, network, edit, share, even steal online, and pass it to hundreds of friends or colleagues,” writes Kunz. If you want to communicate with these people on line, relevance to what they’re doing is king.
So is authenticity. It used to be that “a brand could say, “This is the latest thing, and everybody’s doing it,’ and if the message was persuasive enough, you might believe it,” says Rasmussen. “Now you can check on that on the Internet and see whether everybody actually is doing it.”
“It’s really scary at first,” agrees marketing executive Benjamin Palmer. “You realize there’s a whole dialogue going on outside your brand, and you can’t control it.”
On a weekday evening, more than 100 people dressed in running gear gather on the third floor of Nike’s New York City store. This floor is called the Nike Running Club. People talk as they stretch. They get training advice and the opportunity to try out new products. Nike pays 5 coaches and 17 pacers to lead runs three times a week in Central Park. Store clerks are expected to join in.
On the night in question, 131 runners head up Fifth Avenue and into the park, many wearing Nike running shoes, even more sporting shirts with the Nike swoosh, a human billboard, turning heads of passersby.
Now that’s advertising.
7535 Yellow Arrows
Today, most cell phones know where you are, thanks to an embedded GPS chip. This has got marketers salivating over the prospect of one-to-one DM applications that will promote a product or service that’s right around the corner from you.
This is called the geospatial Web, and there are a number of applications already out there. A lower tech, less threatening and, arguably, more revolutionary wedding of Web and geography began in 2004 as a street art project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The design of Yellow Arrow was deceptively simple. Bright yellow arrow stickers were distributed to participants. Each had a unique alphanumeric code. You placed the sticker pointing to a feature of the urban landscape you wished to commemorate, called up Yellow Arrow on your cell phone, keyed in the code and posted a brief text message.
Passersby could call Yellow Arrow, key in the code and read the message.The messages could be anything – a personal memory, an historical fact, a restaurant review, a goofy poem ... By the time the project wrapped up in 2008, 7535 arrows had been posted in 467 cities in 35 countries.
You can see all of them at http://yellowarrow.net/v3/. A nice feature of the home page is a zoomable Google map covered with yellow arrows; clicking on an arrow will bring up the location, text, and name of the poster.
Most of the arrows are clustered in the United States and Europe, but you can also find them in Bangalore, India; Reykjavik, Iceland; Beijing, China; and Johannesberg, Zaire (“In the everyday drudgery of life do they see the jacaranda trees blossoming?”)
The germ of Yellow Arrow began in the 1950s in the Netherlands with the situationist movement, a group of thinkers and artists who systematized ‘observational drifts’ as a way of appreciating things around them, a process they called “psychogeography.”
According to the website, there are several hundred arrows in the Greater Boston area. Of course, after several New England winters, it’s questionable how many remain. However, every yellow arrow posting, including a photograph and text, has been preserved in the public domain by Flickr.
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