General Discussion

eridani

(51,907 posts) Sat Jul 21, 2012, 04:25 PM Jul 2012

Growing Doubts About Advertising

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/18-5

I can almost hear the chuckles from Madison Avenue reacting to this skepticism about whether ads are worth their price. Such doubts are almost never publicly discussed. One reason has its roots in the musing of pioneering department store magnate, John Wanamaker of Philadelphia. About a century ago, he said he thought that half the money he spent on advertising was effective, but didn’t know which half.

Another reason is that advertisements sell moods, feelings, self-exciting images about the product – selling the sizzle along with the steak, as the saying goes. These feelings connect to the corporate branding strategies and are hard to measure.
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Recently however, it was General Motors, of all companies, that said very publicly what many companies have been thinking for a long time. In May, stunning the advertising and internet industry, the world’s largest vehicle manufacturer announced that it would pull $10 million in ads from Facebook because they are not effective. A few days later, GM pulled out of the Super Bowl advertising frenzy – commercials for Super Bowl XVII are now going for $4 million per 30 seconds – on the grounds that it “simply could not justify the expense.” This is another way of saying the ads didn’t sell enough cars.

The mass media, which carries such exorbitant commercial messages, plays large corporate competitors, as in the auto and computer industries, against one another. “You don’t want to be left out of the Super Bowl, with its 111 million viewers, do you?” Of course, given the multiple distractions of family, dogs, cats, bathrooms, opening beer bottles, laughing at each other’s remarks, far fewer millions actually see the hyper-kinetic ads that bleed into one another before viewers even catch a logo.

Those managers arguing for ever larger ad budgets convey a “you gotta believe” mentality. It takes lots of myth, hope, gambling and reliance on the artistry and cleverness of the copywriters and ad designers to bring about the blockbuster breakthrough ad that arouses its beleaguered, saturated audience, enmeshed in a blizzard of sequential ads, and makes a memorable recollection of the product or service offered.