First, a link to the column:
I don’t know if it’s just me or my browser (chrome), but I’m not seeing Slug’s artwork.
What’s up with that?
See it on mine. Maybe your ad blocker blocked it.
Since the advent of scanners 20-something years ago, retailers have been able to track product sales minute-by-minute if they want to. The more sophisticated markets (Wal-Mart, to name one) look at the sales figures every morning and can tell tell, city by city, if their advertising is having an effect.
The old long-distance company MCI was a pioneer in this. They would literally start and stop advertising in different cities based on the response they got.
Of course sophisticated analysis costs money. Most smaller businesses can’t or won’t pay for it, leading to much of the crap that abounds today.
Yep, that was it. That never happened before (for me, anyway).
I bet the ad blocker saw that the image file name contains advertising and blocked it.
Who would buy one?
Seriously – who ever wanted to buy a product or a service they never heard of? No matter how cool an iPhone may be, no one would want one if they didn’t know that the iPhone existed.
Advertising (or, at least, marketing) is an absolute necessity.
I wanted an iPhone before they existed. I didn’t know that such a device would eventually be released by Apple, or that it would be called an “iPhone”, but I knew that it would be really cool to have a device that could do functions X, Y, and Z.
Actually, the device I’d really like is several generations beyond what the iPhone is right now, but it’s certainly heading there.
Sure, but “here’s a new product you didn’t know about” isn’t most of the advertising we see–I’d argue hardly any ads are of this type. Most of it’s branding stuff for McDonalds, Coke, Microsoft, and 15,000 effectively identical car ads. We all know these products exist, or at least the people who’ve never heard of Coke don’t make up much of the buying public. Even for the new product ads, research shows that people remember the commercials or ads, but often not the brand or actual product.
Almost. The problem is singling out “advertising” as if it’s a freestanding element. Advertising, as the term is usually used, describes one small facet of the marketing process. It isn’t really intended to sell products on its own; it’s intended to shape buying behavior to give the advertised product an edge when the consumer enters a competitive marketing zone.
There have been successful products with minimal advertising… but not with minimal marketing.
One of advertising’s primary function is as much to run interference for the rest of the marketing effort as to bolster it. This is the primary reason why being “anti-advertising” is a self-deluded shuck, ignorant posturing at best.
(One of Cece’s less deeply considered columns, IMO.)
When they don’t actually remember it as a different product.
Quick… which soda was Max Headroom promoting in the mid-1980s?
New Coke. A surprising number of people say Pepsi, because the competitor and its name was so prominently featured in the campaign.
Yes, but is it really because that product was mentioned so prominently, or because so many of us have worked so hard at forgetting the other product?
Good point, although it’s still around. (Yes, it is.)
This was the case when the ads were running. They were clever, engaging, new, trendy… and managed to promote the competitor as much as the sponsor.
Hence the frequently-forgotten and hard-relearned rule: DON’T NAME THE COMPETITION. It invariably promotes the opposition, and if the ads diss the competition, it tends to pull down both brand rankings. Bad tactic, always has been, always will be… but the agencies re-learn it periodically and expensively.
I also wonder about advertising for films or TV shows, for instance, which certainly CAN be effective (but needn’t.) And the converse: new movies or TV shows that don’t advertise, certainly don’t attract the huge audiences.
To what degree advertising (alone) is effective, it relies on predisposition. If someone doesn’t like horror movies, the most lavish, incessant, invasive campaign for a new horror flick is not likely to put many of those people in seats.
A lot of comments about advertising (and marketing, to some degree) are absurdly simplistic and assume that there is only one level on which it functions (or “works”) - the “I just saw a beer ad and didn’t run for a cold one, nyah nyah” level of argument. The marketing industry loves that attitude as much as a broad tosser loves the guy who announces that he knows the trick.
A lot of people think that advertising is aimed solely at consumers. This is untrue. Advertising that appears to be consumer oriented may really be targeted at shareholders and investors, government regulators, and countering misinformation. If McDonalds did not advertise 100% beef, then who would counter defamatory rumors that McDonalds is mostly made of soy or worms?
A friend of mine once pointed out that you see three things everywhere you go in the world: Coca-Cola, Singer sewing machines, and Mormon missionaries. I suspect that all three organizations like it that way. Advertising promotes the idea of being popular, of being everywhere. In the James Bond movies, Quantum did not advertise. See where that got them?
Speaking of advertising–I miss the old days when the ads on SDMB touted the venomous glaucus atlanticus as a weight-loss boon.
Now its TITS TITS TITS HEY YOU LIKE 'UM TITTIES TITS TITS WHO THE HELL REFERS TO THEM AS “BALLOONS” TITS TITS ALL THAT IS AND EVER WILL MATTER TITS
There was another case, back in the 50s I think, where some food company or another ran a massive ad campaign for their new line of canned soups… with the result that Campbell’s soups saw a huge uptick in sales. It turned out that the commercials were really good at getting people to want to buy canned soup, but when they did, they went with the canned soup they were already familiar with.
Only false if you overemphasize “solely.” All consumer product ads are primarily aimed at consumers, albeit sometimes via a roundabout approach.
IIRC, McDonald’s settled the wormburger debacle by pointing out that worms were considerably more expensive than the beef they used.
While confirming that they were 100% beef, making the “ads” as much consumer-oriented as anything else.
Well, when you insert the words consumer product. Things like the recent BNSF ad campaigns can’t have much effect on consumers. How can it make me consume more freight train transport?
That said, I remember doing a workshop once with Todd Gitland on corporate culture, where he mentioned that some marketing execs at a large company (I think it was Coca Cola) admitted to him that they have such big budgets that they spend on advertising whether it works or not, because they see a value to boosting corporate ego, if nothing else.
I used to have an ad from a trade journal aimed at microwave communications engineers. It was a gorgeous full-page shot of an aluminum block studded with connectors, and the copy was written in English but absolutely incomprehensible - “20% more MRE’s than our first-generation KTL!” and so forth.
It’s safe to say that trade and industry advertising, whether it’s for goods, services or “information” purposes, is not what most people think of when discussing “advertising.” Specifying “consumer goods advertising” is a bit like specifying “passenger-carrying vehicles under 5,000 pounds requiring no special training or licensing to drive” when the subject is “cars.”
Non-consumer good ads are largely irrelevant to most discussions.