Times Square Is A Big Stage, But The Ads Still Have To Be Interesting

from the mr-whipple dept

The advertising world is undergoing something of a sea change, as traditional methods like TV and print ads lose their effectiveness with consumers. One of the biggest challenges for advertisers is how to take advantage of blogs and other so-called social-media sites where people are spending ever-increasing amounts of time. For some companies, gaming the system to gain attention is the preferred method, but others are figuring out some different, indirect ways. For instance, marketers are discovering that by advertising or staging marketing stunts in places like Times Square, photos and videos featuring their brands are showing up on sites like Flickr and YouTube. The ad industry is looking favorably on experiential marketing, which the IHT describes as campaigns "intended to give people something they can try out and photograph." Experiential marketing is nothing new, but it's taking on a new life thanks to these media-sharing sites, in a further reflection that advertising is content. People are taking pictures and videos of this stuff not because it's advertising, but because it's satisfying content that they want to share with others. Putting it in Times Square or another high-traffic location, provides it a big stage, but doesn't guarantee its success. Advertising that's intrusive, annoying, or simply uninteresting is becoming unviable -- whether it's in a traditional ad, or in a "marketing experience".
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Still Another anonymous coward, 11 Dec 2006 @ 8:55am

    Super Bowl Syndrome

    Make the ads interesting and the people will look.

    Consider Darin on Bewitched, and how the ad industry looked in that day. Now ads are cranked out like oatmeal. Come on, guys. Let's have a little creativity.

    My other gripe is about companies that advertise products that:
    a. limited audience - such as the old BASF ads, targeting company bosses.
    b. drug company ads that make you want to toss your cookies. I don't appreciate dancing nose boogers.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Smoky, 11 Dec 2006 @ 11:08am

    Monitoring the Internet

    Right - - - some huge sea changes are moving in way below the radar. Now we have ex-spooks selling to Madison Avenue in helping them to measure media share and seem to be using intelligence agency techniques to do the work.

    Some large international companies are paying them big bucks to track and data mine mind share for brands, issues, and other things. Through other sources I've found that they worked for some foreign presidential campaigns.

    I tried to get in touch with them but it's real hard to get a response - - - they only seem to to work through referrals from people they know.

    In asking around the word of mouth marketing people; they've heard of them, but don't seem to know much about them other than they seem to be doing a lot of strange work for the ad agencies as well as some secret stuff for the government.

    Some ad agencies are paid on the measurements picked up by this company.

    They're at www.BuzzAnalytics.com and won't return any of my calls.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    no creativity, 11 Dec 2006 @ 11:13am

    Commercials

    I haven't seen a commercial or advertisement worth viewing since the "Where's the beef" commercials! Use come creativity and quite making them so disgusting and filled with fear-mongering (drug commercials) and maybe the public would listen!

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.