The average consumer can’t go through a day without seeing 3,500 commercial messages. That’s a hell of a lot of clutter for one individual to sift through but that’s the reality of today’s advertising marketplace. From guerilla marketing to all forms of “street furniture” advertising to human sandwich boards, advertising is inescapable unless one were to move to the Moon. Even there, one could probably see the screaming lights of Times Square with Jenna Jameson yelling, “Visit my website! Buy my videos!”
With media fragmentation comes advertiser use of that fragmentation in the increasingly difficult war waged to win the valuable consumer eyeball. This fragmentation has given way to more unique forms of advertising that fall into the guerilla marketing space but even these efforts are getting tired. Once novel, tactics such as forehead advertising, invertising, advergaming, dogvertising, adverblogging, blogvertising, bloodvertising and bravertising are now old hat. Other methods such as school bus, in-school and police car advertising are considered only out of financial desperation. Clearly, the model is hurting.
It is important for marketers to make sure their efforts do not become old hat. Trouble is, it’s like a flushing toilet with marketers trying desperately to invent their next move in order not to be sucked down the vortex of extinction. It almost makes one pine for the pre-cable, three network, Clear Channel-less radio, Look Magazine days of old. OK, not really, but do I really want an advertiser offering to paint my house for free in exchange for allowing that paint job to include the advertiser’s logo gracing the front of my house?
