Advertisers sure are a curious lot. A couple of weeks ago, there was a big article in The New York Times Sunday Business section about the dramatic growth of product placement in TV shows as an alternative to traditional television advertising. Reason being, as the article put it: “As technology and clutter blunt the effectiveness and reach of the commercial spots that have underpinned the television business for nearly 50 years, the various players are scrambling to adapt.”
“Scrambling” is the word all right, but I have my doubts about this souffle ever rising. Just parsing the sentence quoted above should send any intelligent advertising person straight to the nearest bar (which obviously will not have to be a very large establishment).
Let’s start with this “reach” that is supposedly being “blunted”. I’ve always thought this was a vastly overrated and misapplied metric. I mean, who cares if your CPM is exactly one zloty if the commercial that is being run is totally ordinary? You really haven’t “reached” anyone. It seems hardly reasonable to assume that just because a message appeared in a certain slot at a certain time anyone noticed it or that the message made any sort of impression on anyone. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, but the CPM figure is no guarantee of anything.
That’s why I’ve always maintained that we use the wrong “M” in CPM. Instead of standing for “thousands” as it does, it should stand for “meaningful” because only an ad that is meaningful to people is likely to have any influence on them. Otherwise, the only people effected by it are the poor dopes who paid for it and the ones who pocketed the money.
Which brings me to the “effectiveness” part of that statement I quoted, a word that in that quote (and most everyones’ minds) is so wedded to “reach” you would think they are one and the same. They’re not. But advertisers don’t seem to get that. So instead of doing anything possible to make their messages more extraordinary and thus more worthy of noticing, they go chasing after the next “reach-of-the-month” vehicle, which I gather is now product placement. But listen to this example the article uses to illustrate the “effectiveness” of product placement.
Apparently, later this month on “The Office” a character the article describes as “the painfully clueless regional manager of a paper supply company” will proudly display his new jeans to his “alternately befuddled and appalled employees” declaring proudly “I love my new Levi’s.” Something the article’s author felt compelled to describe as a “cringe-inducing bit of comedy.”
So let me get this right. Some loser of a character is bragging about his Levi’s and the folks at Levi Strauss think this is a good thing? Maybe that’s why the Company has been in such trouble for so many years. Some of us are old enough to remember when Levi’s advertising (not product placements) was extraordinary. The kind of advertising you stopped what you were doing to watch. And called others into the room to see it, too. That was advertising that genuinely “reached” people, and Mike Koelker must be rolling in his grave to see that it’s come to this.
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