Don’t Look Away
Over the years, an unspoken social contract has developed. Consumers effectively tell advertisers, “Entertain me, and I will give you my attention. Respect my intelligence, and I’ll give you my interest. Do neither, and I’ll give you neither.” Those advertisers that respect the contract enjoy success. Those who don’t end up complaining advertising doesn’t work.
This Business Week article goes on to cite some examples, such as Target, Apple, and John Hancock. Target’s “spots are fun to watch, because they include product placements as part of the entertainment.” Apple went down in history for a commercial that featured a sci-fi snippet rather than the product. John Hancock shows a man getting choked up over a birthday card as part of a campaign that “generated a 17% sales increase.”
This immediately reminds me of the entirely Target-sponsored issue of the New Yorker. Some friends suggested to me that this was advertising at its most insidious, confusing commercialism with content. I wondered if that was such a bad thing — wouldn’t it be nice if ads weren’t such an eyesore? Is a magazine run by a corporation any less commercial? At least you could tell which items were the ads by the logos — in magazines like Wired and How, I seriously can’t tell the ads from the content a lot of the time, especially since so much of the content is cheering on widgets and gizmos that excite the staff (or paid product placement fees, for all I know).
I’m really curious, so please post comments: do you feel you’ve bought into this “contract” with advertisers? Are you happy to look at ads as long as they entertain a bit? Or do they get your attention by being entertaining, but only with some resentment on your part? I think that our default response as educated people and as consumers is often to just decry all attempts to market to us, but then again, certain media forms really couldn’t exist in our contemporary economic structure without advertising. Given that ads are a pretty much necessary aspect of our media consumption, what’s the best way to receive them, as far as you’re concerned?
4 Comments so far
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I find product placement in the shows rather annoying. I saw an episode of Smallville this season where they did a full 2-second close-up of a box of Acuvue contact lenses — way too blatant. I like magazine ads more than television commercials because I feel like they are better integrated with the content. That is, I see t.v. commercials as more of an interruption. Maybe that’s because the magazines I read are more likely to have ads for products I might be interested in?
By Jordan on 05.15.06 9:10 am
I actually have one of the pages from the Target issue of the New Yorker on my wall. Despite my anger usual level of frustration from having worked for them for so long, I still couldn’t resist having a lovely piece of James Jean art that promoted to company.
By Jeremy on 05.15.06 8:53 pm
I see it as a natural evolution of saturday morning cartoons being designed to shill action figures. The presentation has simply been refined to fit the needs of a “mature” audience. I used to spend a decent amounts of time watching ads that had been posted to the internet because many of the cool ones have awesome examples of animation or CG imagery in them.
By Tony on 05.16.06 12:57 am
[...] I find it kind of ironic that Sony made the same mistake twice here. I can see why Sony Ericsson (as described in the Washington Post article, linked above) might think it needs to hire actors to pretend to be tourists and shill its camera phones, even if I do find that sneaky, evil, and underhanded. But for a video game system? Sony has enough die-hard fans who would be happy to promote its products if only the company offered something to help get the ball rolling, such as with alternate reality game promotions like those recalled by Tycho at Penny Arcade. One such game, I Love Bees, was successfully used to get people excited and talking about the video game Halo. This isn’t just about making entertaining ads—this is about letting people get involved and promoting good will toward a brand. Perhaps it’s easier to get people mobilized around a particular work of media than the hardware it runs on, but considering how quickly the PS3 overtook the XBox 360 in sales in Japan, the Sony-loyal must be out there somewhere. [...]
By doombot » Sony Marketing Campaign Sux0rs on 12.13.06 12:46 pm
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