My friend George Murphy who runs the marketing, branding, and strategy firm Modo-Group has been talking for years about how ineffective traditional advertising has become in terms of actually causing customers to buy products and services.
I was reading an article in the New York Times this morning about how Unilever has reached out to bands and street musicians (also known as buskers) and bands, offering them $1,000 to have a sign promoting there AXE deodorant.
It reminded me of an article that appeared almost two years ago (graphic to the left) that talked about advertising spending, and the article made a huge impression on me on several fronts. First, the fact that organizations like P&G have marketing budgets approaching five billion dollars really shocked me. Then to learn that most companies like P&G have no idea which of their ads actually works in terms of getting people to buy their products, let alone who is buying them. The thrust of the 2007 article was that companies are entering an experimental phase where they are not only trying new ways to reach customers to get their brand and their message in front of the right crowd (like busker supporters . . ), but they also want to know who is actually responding to those messages. Obviously the internet is making a lot of that information more capture-able, but companies still seem to be slow to move on that opportunity.
Related to that, I was talking with a friend about services like Tivo that let people record programs and watch their shows when they want to, and also skip through the ads and the person commented that advertisers must hate that. In fact I think that any hate that exists will be short lived, because what is already increasingly common is product placement in the TV show itself. Recently I was watching an episode of the Showtime series Dexter, about a serial killer who works in the Miami crime lab, the name of the character is Dexter Morgan, and in one scene he was making margaritas in for about 15 seconds, a bottle of Captain Morgan’s rum was prominent on the TV screen. Dexter also uses an Apple laptop, which is made known on every episode. Another series I watch Californication, the very funny series with X-files alumnus David Duchovny, features a down-on-his-luck author who ends up teaching a class at the local university and he learns that one of his students works nights as a stripper – one night he takes his friend Charlie Runkle to the strip club to see her and he asks around for his student and no one knows what he’s talking about and then she shows up and says she works under the stage name “Ashley Madison” and she says the name at least three times, which seemed excessive. So I did an internet search on Ashley Madison, and sure enough, it’s the name of an internet site for people already in relationships, who want to have a secret fling. Very clever product placement, though because of services like Tivo, since people can be watching the show at any time, it can be hard for Ashleymadison.com to figure out which of its customers came from Californication.
So it’s going to be very interesting to see how companies rethink the ways to connect with customers, while at the same time collect data about who is, and isn’t buying it.
-Ric
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