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Threats to Traditional Advertising

The concern that companies have had about measuring the value of their ads is as old as the advertising industry. Part of that worry comes from the awareness that people may not pay attention to ads, even if they are staring right at them. As radio and television began to air commercials, advertisers also worried that many members of the audience wouldn't sit still to watch their spots. Ad practitioners imagined large segments of listeners and viewers going to the bathroom or kitchen during commercial “breaks." The challenge then becomes to make the ads interesting, funny, disgusting, or cute enough for target audiences to actually want to hear, watch, or read them. This has become an important goal of creativity in advertising.

During the past decade or so, though, advertisers have become increasingly concerned that consumers are using new technologies to help them avoid commercial messages so they don’t even have to decide whether they want to attend to them. Marketers know that Americans are using digital video recorders to rush through broadcast, cable, and satellite television shows. Online, they are using email filters and pop-up killers to get rid of unwanted ads. Advertisers fear that these technolo­gies are only the beginning of a raft of approaches that allow audiences to enjoy ad- sponsored materials with hardly any confronting of the ads.

Sometimes the ways they express their concerns verge on the hilarious. Consider the worries that Jamie Kellner, CEO of Turner Broadcasting, expressed in 2002 about DVRs. He told the magazine Cable World that DVR users were “stealing" television by skipping the commercials. “Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get shows on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial... you're actually stealing the programming.” When his interviewer asked him, “What if you have to go to the bathroom or get up to get a Coke,” Kellner responded: “I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you’ve got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They’ve done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial.”

Over the next few years, it became clear that DVR makers were trying to make their devices ad-friendly—for example by providing special places for advertisements on their devices and encouraging visits to advertisers’ websites. Nevertheless, advertisers remained concerned. Their worries were bolstered by a 2005 survey by the Yankelov- ich Partners market research company that found 69 percent of American consumers “said they were interested in ways to block, skip or opt out of being exposed to advertising.” Fear continued that rapidly spreading technologies could make mulch of the traditional approaches to buying advertising.

Some TV executives deny that DVRs are that big an issue. They point to research that finds viewers still do remember the essential messages of brands they race through with their wands. But marketers who worry about ad skipping have come up with different tactics to get around the problem. One approach was to make advertisements more relevant to specifically targeted audiences with the hope that they would know that and not skip them. Another tactic was to make deleting or skipping the ads impossible; that’s the case with in-game ads and the ads in online videos. Still another set of solutions that marketers are using involves bypassing tra­ditional advertising altogether. To understand this last set of solutions, recall that at the start of this chapter we defined advertising as the activity of explicitly paying for media space or time in order to direct favorable attention to certain goods or services.

From the standpoint of a marketer, the advantage of being explicit about what you are selling is that you have a lot of control over when, where, and in front of what audience your product will appear. You also have control over the message; the ad or commercial runs exactly as you intended it. The disadvantage of being explicit, though, is that the audience knows that you're trying to persuade it, and it may well try to get out of the way.

The alternative, many marketers understand, is trying to get in front of audiences through ways that don't announce their presence as persuasion. There are many ways to do that, and you've probably come into contact with all of them. You've already seen a definition for public relations, which involves the unannounced insertion of products or ideas into media materials. You’ve probably heard of product placement, when a brand is inserted into a TV show or movie as a result of a marketing deal. You may not have heard of viral marketing, buzz marketing, or environmental marketing.

These businesses are growing tremendously—faster than the advertising business— as marketers look for a way to reach consumers in ways that will virtually force them to pay attention to their messages. We can group them under the label public rela­tions and other marketing communications. These are important activities, critical to understanding the direction of many media today. We’ll tackle them in Chapter 16: The Public Relations Industry.