RHetoric

For those who didn’t have the chance to read my blog posting after the Super Bowl, I wrote a commentary on the state of television advertising. The general point of the posting was that TV commercials are becoming an antiquated form of advertising, with the unique exception of Super Bowl ad buys.

Today, I read the Bulldog Reporter’s Daily ‘Dog, a weekly newsletter about the PR industry, and came across an article relevant to my previous post:

Marketers Disillusioned with TV’s Payoff In Post-Strike World: Survey Finds Advertisers Looking for Better Metrics, Better Formats

Has traditional TV advertising truly lost its power? Regardless of the answer, marketers and advertisers are already eager to find alternatives. A new survey from the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research shows a dramatic loss of confidence in the medium as the industry gears up to explore new ad formats and forms of video commercials, Advertising Age reports.

Click here for the full article

I know, the Super Bowl has come and gone. It’s been five days since I was glued to the TV during commercials, and four days since I logged onto the Internet to watch them over and over again. I spent minutes, maybe hours, commenting, dissecting and discussing these ads with my friends and colleagues–nothing too blog worthy there. But I was just on my LinkedIn account looking at the Q&A section and came across my answer to a question on major trends affecting marketing. My answer from LinkedIn:

Technology-shortened attention spans will become the single largest defining characteristic in the practice of marketing. We are already seeing the influence technology (e.g. TiVo & DVRs) is having on television marketing. Commercials are becoming less effective means of advertising, primarily because of the tendency of the viewer to switch channels, or fast forward. The answer… product placements within shows and movies.

The impact on the practice of marketing is clear: a successful marketer needs to define and exploit marketable moments. These moments are becoming less defined by commercials and magazine ads, and more transient.

Over the next 10 years, marketing will become less obvious to its targets. Yet customer targeting will result in greater efficacy.

Well that answer seems to be completely counter to what I just experienced with the Super Bowl … or is it? In fact, I think the commercials that air during the big game are anachronisms of marketing. Watching a commercial break is the same as going to a museum and walking through an exhibit on dinosaurs. But in the case of the Super Bowl, we all get a trip to Jurassic Park. Figure 1 Picture from National Museum of American History Web Site

For one day of the year, we use our DVRs not to bypass commercials, but to rewind and re-watch them. I remember four occasions in which someone I was watching the game with asked for a commercial to be rewound. That same request happened only once during the actual game. In fact, there was a notable decrease in conversation noise DURING the commercials, not the game. Who knows if the results from these Super Bowl ads will justify the extreme cost. We’ll see if the Super Bowl commercial paradox continues–or if we are all watching the dying days of mass-market commercial advertising on TV.