These idiotic ads for home security systems aren’t anything new, but this one happened to air while I was in a position to capture it.
If you are afraid of such a thing:
So, if you spend $3 million on a Super Bowl ad for beer, or corn chips, or candy bars, you advertise something that you sell every day — and something that you intend to go on selling every day until the end of time.
If you spend $3 million to advertise a particular car, you advertise something that you’ll only be selling for a year or so. But it’s a very expensive something as things go, and your ad also serves to strengthen your overall brand. Most Super Bowl ads are really about advertising the overall brand more than they are about selling a specific product.
So why do there seem to be as many ads for movies during the Super Bowl as for anything else? With the exception of certain ‘franchises’ of endless sequels — nearly all of which are incredibly bad and short-lived — there’s no ‘brand’ as such to establish in movies. Any particular movie is only going to be in the theaters for a few weeks; it’ll then be available as an expensive DVD for a few months; and then it’ll be in that giant bin at Wal-Mart, or on the Amazon four-for-three deal.
If it turns out to be a fantastic movie, of course, it’ll be in the theaters and on the regular-price DVD rack longer; but then this would be the case even without the Super Bowl ad. But these movies aren’t going to be fantastic; one of them is another The Fast and The Furious sequel, for Christ’s sake. And all of these movies being advertised seem to be scheduled for release in about five months, by which time most people will have forgotten about the ads anyway.
How on Earth does this pay off? Must be something about Hollywood’s Chinese accounting.
The ads on the inauguration coverage on the local DC TV stations are a bit strange. The vast majority of them are for personal-injury lawyers — the usual advertisers on local TV at this time of say — but also lots of frankly disingenuous ads about the Employee Free Choice Act, AKA ‘card check’.
The EFCA would allow unions to sign up members by getting them to sign union cards, rather than through a secret ballot as is currently required. The unions’ argument is that this secret-ballot procedure is cumbersome and inconvenient, and that its effect is to make it more difficult to unionize workplaces. They probably have a point.
On the other hand, a ‘card check’ procedure would mean that people pushing for unionization of a given workplace would know exactly who was with them and who was against them. It might then turn out to be in the union’s interest to cajole, threaten, or eliminate — by getting them fired or by encouraging them to resign, not by killing them (though that’s not unknown either in the history of unionization) — recalcitrant employees.
This is what the ads are calling ‘a level playing field’, while strongly giving the impression that unionization is impossible otherwise.
The AP has the story now; Tinotopia had it almost two years ago.
Do you see a way to get rid of this ad that popped into view? I don’t:
Unless I’m really, really interested in the article, I’m just going to leave when something like this happens, rather than puzzle out how to dismiss the ad. And if it happens often enough, I’m going to avoid the site in the first place — or beef up my ad filters. Attempting to show me ads that are too intrusive and rude will result in me attempting to block all your ads.
Incidentally, if I click on ‘Click Here’, nothing happens, probably because the developers of the ad only thought about Internet Explorer.
Are there some businesses that only work as monopolies? A lot of people would say that utilities and railroads and such fall into this category, but those just depend on critical masses of customers. There are plenty of places that are served by two railroads, each in its own right-of-way; and if you could get the permits to install the pipes, you could easily run two water systems in most cities. It might be most efficient to operate a single series of (water) tubes, but there’s no particular reason why there has to be only one.
A short story recently in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has me thinking, though.
Verizon will sell ads for its first St. Louis directory
Verizon joins more than a half-dozen competitors selling Yellow Pages ads in St. Louis this week.
[...]
AT&T Directory Operations, based in downtown St. Louis, distributes more than 1 million copies of its Greater St. Louis directory, as well as smaller numbers of neighborhood directories. Other local competitors include Yellow Book, Megabook, Impact Directories, the St. Louis Black Pages, Women’s Yellow Pages of St. Louis and Chinese Yellow Pages.
Jeff Oberschelp, a Verizon regional vice president, said the company decided to enter the St. Louis market because it believes it can offer a competitive value to advertisers here. [...]
Competitive? Is this actually a good thing for the consumer (and thus the advertiser) in the phone-directory business?
At Tino Manor in Front Royal, VA, we get at least four phone books.
This is the official phone book; it was issued in March 2006 by Sprint (now ‘Embarq’), who also send the phone bills and drive around in trucks maintaining wires. It’s actually published by Donnelley, but for Sprint. That’s not important, though. What’s important about this directory is that it is almost entirely useless.
It’s useless because it’s full of errors, in both the white pages and the yellow pages parts. Call a number listed in this book, and there’s a better than even chance that you’re going to get a wrong number or an out-of-service recording. I am in there twice, despite having only one phone line: and neither entry lists my actual phone number. The phone book has been like this for as long as we’ve lived here. Every year they print up and deliver another edition with a fresh set of errors.
It’s also useless because it covers a totally arbitrary area: it has complete listings for Front Royal and Washington (VA); white pages only listings for Culpeper and Sperryville; and business listings for Winchester.
Then there’s the Yellow Book.
This covers a much wider area, but of course it only covers those people who choose to advertise in it.
There’s also the EZ To Use Big Book:
Or, as we call it, PLUMBER, as PLUMBER is the biggest text on the cover. This one has offered up for sale its very identity.
And, finally, the Shentel Pages:
Shentel used to be the local phone company in the northern Shenandoah Valley; now they’re just an ISP and a brand name for an off-brand yellow pages.
In the end, we’ve stopped bothering with any of these books, even though at least one of them probably contains the information we’re likely to look for, because the time and consternation involved in hunting through all of them just isn’t worth the trouble.
This suggests an interesting hypothesis:
Consumers and businesses both are best served, in advertising, by monopolies or oligopolies.
And this goes double for classified advertising: every additional place that an advertiser has to buy space, and every additional place a consumer has to look for an ad imposes large costs on both the advertiser and the would-be consumer.
Classified advertising is absurdly easy to do online, but it was only when Craigslist came along and established a monopoly that it became very useful. Newspapers had been reluctant to put their classifieds online, because the classified ads drove the sale of a lot of newspapers. And all the non-Craigslist, non-newspaper classified advertising sites — of which there were thousands — didn’t achieve the critical mass that’s necessary to make them useful resources for consumers.
Every city or any size has at least one company like Frederic Roofing. I don’t mean that in the sense that every city has an outfit that will put a roof on your house or your place of business, though that’s certainly true, too.
I mean every city has at least one company with a horrible jingle that everyone in town knows. If you know anyone from St. Louis, you might sing to them: “For a hole in your roof, or a whole new roof” and they’ll respond “Frederic Roofing!”
Either that or they’ll look at you like you’re insane. If they do that, though, you’ll at least have gained the knowledge that your friend either:
A. grew up without a television or radio, and was forbidden to ever watch anyone else’s TV or listen to anyone else’s radio, or
B. is not from St. Louis at all. Check to see whether your friend speaks Russian, or is from Remulac (a small town in France).
This one is pretty typical of the Frederic Roofing TV oeuvre, misaligned and badly-lit card and all. They are still using the same jingle — the same recording of the same jingle — in their current ads, and I don’t even think they’ve added the area code to the phone number.
Frederic Roofing, :30, 1.1mb Quicktime.
Mike Shannon played right field and third base for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1962 to 1970, when he retired from baseball after being diagnosed with nephritis. From 1972 to the present, he has provided the color commentary for Cardinals games on the radio.
As a baseball player, he was good but not great. He only had a lifetime batting average of .255 in 2,780 at-bats, but he was born in St. Louis, never played for any team other than the Cardinals, and has never lived anywhere else. In St. Louis, this makes him something of a god: I do not think that this guy could manage to pay for his own drinks anywhere in town. Not that he should be drinking at all, what with his kidneys.
Anyway, his position makes him a natural pitchman in St. Louis for just about anything. In the 1980s, for some reason, this meant woodenly pitching residental HVAC equipment. You can tell he’s a radio guy in this spot; his delivery is great, but he looks like he’s been propped up with a 2×4. In my memory, at least, he’s always that squinty.
Comfortmaker, :30, 1.1mb Quicktime.
“This isn’t awesome” — but the commercial sure is. I wonder whether Geico has two different ad agencies? Most of their ads are horrible, but this is pretty clever.
Tiny House, :30, 2mb Quicktime.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today, particularly apropos of yesterday’s thing about the MTA’s proposal to rename subway stations for corporate sponsors. (Journal subscribers can read the article here; if you’re not a subscriber, why not? You can download a 155K PDF of it here.)
The article in question is about product placement in video games, and how the advertising industry is all agog about it.
That in itself is somewhat interesting. It’s hard to sort out cause and effect here, but the advertising industry always seems to be agog about something, but for all the ad industry’s focus on novelty, very few of its innovations actually work, at all.
This is true behind the scenes as well as in its product: In the mid-1990s, Chiat/Day was famously agog about ‘hoteling‘, the idea that worker-bees should not be assigned permanent work spaces, but that they should just come in in the morning and sit down at whatever desk was free. Computer networking and modern phone systems make this possible, if not practicable: hoteling was a disaster. Chiat/Day — an organization that’s supposed to have its finger on the pulse of how to motivate people — completely ignored the fact that people don’t like this. The program had some good results — like introducing cordless phones so that people are reachable even when they’re not sitting at their desks — but overall the somewhat predictable effect was to make people feel uncomfortable and disconnected.
Nevertheless, because Chiat/Day knows nothing like it knows how to promote things, and so a lot of other companies attempted to duplicate this harebrained scheme, and they continue to attempt to duplicate it, even long after Chiat/Day themselves concluded that it wasn’t cost-effective and went back to a more traditional approach.
Anyway, the current idea in advertising seems to be that, since people aren’t watching TV ads, maybe they’ll notice our products if we stick ‘em into video games somehow.
For years, videogames have been stealing away consumers who might otherwise have been watching television or reading a magazine. Now they’re beginning to attract business from some of the U.S.’s most coveted advertisers, part of a broader assault by new media and technology on the traditional ad industry.
It’s not a ‘broader assault’ by anything but the advertisers themselves, though. Consider an average TV show: you watch it because you find it entertaining or informative. Several times an hour, the stuff you find entertaining or informative stops, and the ads come on.
These ads, any advertising 101 textbook will tell you, need to grab your attention somehow and hold it, and then present you with whatever specific message the advertiser wants to get across. Ads for a few products — diet soda, chewing gum, and beer most prominently — do this by putting good-looking women on the screen. In ads for some other things, you can generally count on seeing a baby. These are some very basic attention-getters for certain demographics, and they’re based in biology.
Beyond those few things, though, advertisers seem to be entirely out of ideas. One of the few new ones I’ve read about lately is to somehow rig the software in TiVos and similar devices so that you cannot skip the ads. If they don’t want to see the ads, we’ll force ‘em to see the ads! That’s certainly a way to build audiences and goodwill.
Anyway, maybe someone put down the crack pipe long enough to realize that. Unfortunately, the video game he played while sobering up gave him an idea.
There are two different approaches to product-placement in video games, I gather: the first involves sticking your product or logo into a commercial video game, and the second involves making your own video game that’s centered, somehow, around your product.
The main problem with the second approach is that there are not that many products to which it’s even applicable. It works for cars — and according to the Journal article, Jeep has had some success with it — but what other products can be so easily turned into a game? ‘Dish Washer 3: Plates of Rage’ might be useful for Dawn product-placement, but it would suck as a game. Most of the things advertised on TV these days seem to be medications of one sort or another, but somehow I don’t think that ‘Flonase Floyd In The Land Of Pollen’ — the gameplay would involve wandering around and breathing — would find too many willing players.
This leaves the first approach, the idea of sticking your logo or product into a video game that people actually buy. While this might work for any product, it doesn’t work for all games: you can easily have a billboard for Snuggle high above Vice City, but that doesn’t make sense in a lot of other games. If video-game producers follow the path of the TV companies, they’ll start tailoring the games to the advertisers’ needs, by ranking ‘advertisibility’ near the top of the list of design considerations. We’ll wind up with games like “Drive Down Billboard Alley ’08″, which no one in their right mind will pay for, and the advertisers will again speak of an ‘assault’ and will come up with another cockamamie scheme, possibly involving naming rights again. Viagra Presents Staten Island. The Great Ohio Experience, Brought To You By Depends. The USS Cialis, CVN-65: 280,000 shaft horsepower: for the whole weekend! Warning: those with high blood pressure should not use nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
I’ve written before (warning: embedded Quicktime) about the hazards of product placement, as well as about its potential. The problem with most product placement is the same as the product with most advertising in general these days: the advertisers feel that the audience owes their attention to the advertisements for supporting whatever main content is being supported by the advertising. Unsurprisingly, the audience sees it differently, and the eagerness of the advertising industry to find alternative methods of getting their messages in front of the public suggests that they don’t have any real idea why their TV ads are not working. As long as they don’t know that, they’re not likely to be able to come up with product-placement strategies — whether for video games or anything else — that achieve their goals, either.
