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INTRODUCTION
It's not your fault. It's just physically
impossible for you to pay attention to everything that
marketers expect you to -- like the 17,000 new grocery
store products that were introduced last year, or the
$1,000 worth of advertising that was directed exclusively
at you last year.
Is it any wonder that consumers feel like
the fast-moving world around them is getting blurry? There's
TV at the airport, advertisements in urinals, newsletters
on virtually every topic, and a cellular phone wherever
you go.
This is a book about the attention crisis
in America and how marketers can survive and thrive in
this harsh new environment. Smart marketers have discovered
that the old way of advertising and selling products isn't
working as well as it used to, and they're aggressively
searching for a new, enterprising way to increase market
share and profits. Permission Marketing is a fundamentally
different way of thinking about advertising and customers.
1. THERE'S NO MORE ROOM FOR ALL
THESE ADVERTISEMENTS!
I remember when I was about five years old and started
watching television seriously. There were only three main
channels-2, 4 and 7, plus a public channel and UHF channel
for when you were feeling adventuresome. I used to watch
Ultraman every day after school on channel 29.
With just five channels to choose from,
I quickly memorized the TV schedule. I loved shows like
The Munsters, and I also had a great time with the TV
commercials. Charlie the Tuna, Tony the Tiger and those
great board games that seemed to magically come alive
all vied for my attention. And they got it.
Growing up, it seemed like everyone I met
was part of the same community. We saw the same commercials,
bought the same stuff, discussed the same TV shows.
Marketing was in a groove - if you invented
a decent product and put enough money into TV advertising
you could be pretty sure you'd get shelf space in stores.
And if the ads were any good at all, people bought the
products.
About ten years ago, I realized that a sea
change was taking place. I had long ago ceased to memorize
the TV schedules, I was unable to keep up with all the
magazines I felt I should be reading, and with new alternatives
like Prodigy and a book superstore, I fell hopelessly
behind in my absorption of media.
I found myself throwing away magazines unopened.
I was no longer interested enough in what a telemarketer
might say to hesitate before hanging up. I discovered
that I could live without hearing every new Bob Dylan
album and that while there were plenty of great restaurants
in New York City, the ones near my house in the suburbs
were just fine.
The clutter, as you know, has only gotten
worse. Try counting how many marketing messages you encounter
today. Don't forget to include giant brand names on T-shirts,
the logos on your computer, the Microsoft start-up banner
on your monitor, radio ads, TV ads, airport ads, billboards,
bumper stickers and even the ads in your local paper.
For ninety years, marketers have relied
on one form of advertising almost exclusively. I call
it Interruption Marketing. Interruption, because the key
to each and every ad is to interrupt what the viewers
are doing in order to get them to think about something
else.
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2. INTERRUPTION MARKETING --THE
TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO GETTING CONSUMER ATTENTION
Almost no one goes home eagerly anticipating
junk mail in their mailbox. Almost no one reads People
magazine for the ads. Almost no one looks forward to a
three minute commercial interruption on Must See TV.
Advertising is not why we pay attention.
Yet marketers must make us pay attention for the ads to
work. If they don't interrupt our train of thought by
planting some sort of seed in our conscious or subconscious,
the ads fail. Wasted money. If an ad falls in the forest
and no one notices, there is no ad.
You can define advertising as the science
of creating and placing media that interrupts the consumer
and then gets him or her to take some action. That's quite
a lot to ask of thirty seconds of TV time or 25 square
inches of the newspaper, but without interruption, there's
no chance for action, and without action, advertising
flops.
As the marketplace for advertising gets
more and more cluttered, it becomes increasingly difficult
to interrupt the consumer. Imagine you're in an empty
airport, early in the morning. There's hardly anyone there
as you leisurely stroll towards your plane.
Suddenly, someone walks up to you and says,
"Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Gate 7?" Obviously,
you weren't hoping for, or expecting, someone to come
up and ask this question, but since he looks nice enough
and you've got a spare second, you interrupt your train
of thought and point him on his way.
Now, imagine the same airport, but it's
three in the afternoon and you're late for your flight.
The terminal is crowded with people, all jostling for
position. You've been approached five times by various
faux charities on your way to the gate, and you've got
a headache to top it all off.
Same guy comes up to you and asks the same
question. Odds are, your response will be a little different.
If you're a New Yorker, you might ignore him altogether.
Or you may stop what you were doing, say, "sorry," and
then move on.
A third scenario is even worse. What if
he's the fourth, or the tenth, or the one hundredth person
who's asked you the same question? Sooner or later you're
going to tune out the interruptions. Sooner or later,
it all becomes background noise.
Well, your life is a lot like that airport
scene. You've got too much to do and not enough time to
get it done. You're being accosted by strangers constantly.
Every day, you're exposed to more than four hours of media.
Most of it is optimized to interrupt what you're doing.
And increasingly, it's getting harder and harder to find
a little peace and quiet.
The ironic thing is that marketers have
responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible.
To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness
of Interruption Marketing, they're interrupting us
even more!
That's right. Over the last thirty years,
advertisers have dramatically increased their ad spending.
They've also increased the noise level of their ads-more
jump cuts, more in-your-face techniques-and searched everywhere
for new ways to interrupt your day.
Thirty years ago, clothing did not carry
huge logos. Commercial breaks on television were short.
Magazines rarely had three hundred pages of ads (as many
computer magazines do today). You could even watch PBS
without seeing several references to the "underwriter."
As clutter has increased, advertisers have
responded by increasing clutter. And as with pollution,
because no one owns the problem, no one is working very
hard to solve it.
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3. CONSUMERS ARE SPENDING LESS TIME
SEEKING ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS
In addition to clutter, there's another
problem facing marketers. Consumers don't need to care
as much as they used to. The quality of products has increased
dramatically. It's increased so much, in fact, that it
doesn't really matter which car you buy, which coffee
maker you buy, or which shirt you buy. They're all a great
value and they're all going to last a good long while.
We've also come a long way as consumers.
Ninety years ago, it was unusual to find a lot of brand
name products in a consumer's house. Ninety years ago,
we made stuff, we didn't buy it. Today, however, we buy
almost everything. Canned goods. Bread. Perked coffee.
Even water. As a result, we already have a favorite brand
of almost everything. If you like your favorite brand,
why invest time in trying to figure out how to switch?
We're not totally locked in, of course.
It wasn't too long ago that cake mix was a major innovation.
Just a few years ago, we needed to make major decisions
about which airline was going to be our supplier of frequent
flyer miles. And today, if you're going to get health
care, you've got to make a serious choice. But more often
than not, you've already made your decisions and you're
quite happy with them.
When was the last time someone launched
a major new manufacturer of men's suits? Or a large nationwide
chain of department stores? Or a successful new nationwide
airline? Or a fast food franchise? It can be done, certainly,
but it doesn't happen very often. One of the reasons it's
such a difficult task is that we're pretty satisfied as
consumers.
If the deluge of new products ceased tomorrow,
almost no one would mind. How much more functional can
a T-shirt get? Except for fast moving industries like
computers, the brands we have today are good enough to
last us for years and years. Because our needs as consumers
are satisfied, we've stopped looking really hard for new
solutions.
Yet, because of the huge profits that accrue
to marketers who do invent a successful new brand, a new
killer product, a new category, the consumer is deluged
with messages. Because it's not impossible to get you
to switch from MCI to Sprint, or from United Airlines
to American Airlines, or from Reebok to Nike, marketers
keep trying. It's estimated that the average consumer
sees about one million marketing messages a year-about
3,000 a day.
That may seem like a lot, but one trip to
the supermarket alone can expose you to more than 10,000
marketing messages! An hour of television might deliver
40 or more, while an issue of the newspaper might have
as many as 100. Add to that all the logos, wallboards,
junk mail, catalogues, and unsolicited phone calls you
have to process every day and it's pretty easy to hit
that number. A hundred years ago, there wasn't even a
supermarket, there wasn't a TV show, and there weren't
radio stations.
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4. MASS MEDIA IS DEAD. LONG LIVE
NICHE MEDIA!
Technology and the marketplace have also
brought the consumer a glut of ways to be exposed to advertising.
When the FCC ruled the world of television, there were
only three networks and a handful of independents. Networks
made a fortune because they were the only game in town.
Now there are dozens, and in some areas, hundreds of TV
channels to choose from.
The final episode of Seinfeld made
media headlines. Yet thirty years ago, Seinfeld's
ratings wouldn't have made Neilsen's list of top 25 shows
of the season. With an almost infinite number of options,
the chances of a broadcast, even a network broadcast,
reaching almost everyone are close to zero.
Even worse is the World Wide Web. At last
count, there were nearly 2,000,000 different commercial
web sites. That means that there's about 25 people online
for every single website...hardly a mass market of interest
to an interruption marketer.
Alta Vista, one of the most complete and
most visited search engines on the internet, claims to
have indexed 100 million pages. That means that their
computer has surfed and scanned 100 million pages of information,
and if you do a search, that's the database you're searching
through.
It turns out that in response to people
who do searches online, Alta Vista delivers about 900
million pages a month. That means that the average page
that they have indexed in their search engine is called
up exactly nine times a month. Imagine that. Millions
of dollars invested in building snazzy corporate marketing
sites and an average of nine people a month search
for and find any given page of information on this search
engine.
This is a very, very big haystack, and interruption
marketers don't have that many needles.
Marketers have invested (and almost completely
wasted) more than a billion dollars on web sites as a
way of cutting through the clutter. General Electric has
a site with thousands of pages. Ziff-Davis offers a site
with more than 250,000 pages! And a direct result of this
attempt to cut through the clutter is the most cluttered,
least effective marketing of all.
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5. THE FOUR APPROACHES TO KEEPING
MASS MARKETING ALIVE
A quick look at the newsstand at Barnes
& Noble will confirm that the problem of clutter saturation
isn't limited to electronic media. There are enough consumer
magazines (ignoring the even larger category of trade
magazines for a moment) to keep a reader busy reading
magazines full time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Obviously, the mass market is dying. The
vast splintering of media means that a marketer can't
reach a significant percentage of the population with
any single communication. That's one reason the Super
Bowl can charge so much for advertisements. Big events
are unique in their ability to deliver about half the
consumers watching TV, so they're the perfect platform
for Interruption Marketing aimed at the mass audience.
Other than buying even more traditional
advertising, how are mass marketers dealing with this
profound information glut? They're taking four approaches:
(1) First, they're spending more in odd
places. Not just on traditional TV ads, but a wide range
of interesting and obscure media. Campbell's Soup bought
ads on parking meters. Macy's spends a fortune on its
parade. Kellogg's has spent millions building a presence
on the World Wide Web-a fascinating way to sell cereal.
Companies have seen that a mass market broadcast
strategy isn't working as well as it used to, especially
when targeting the hard-to-reach upper income demographic.
As this lucrative audience spends less time watching TV,
marketers are working overtime trying to find media with
less clutter, where their interruption techniques can
be more effective.
Marketers hire Catalina Corporation to print
their coupons on the back of receipts at the grocery store.
They buy ads on the floor of the cereal aisle. There are
ads atop taxis in New York City and on the boards around
the rink at the hockey game. Fox even figured out a way
to sell the rights to the small area over the catcher's
shoulder, so TV viewers would see the ad throughout an
entire baseball game.
(2) The second technique is to make advertisements
ever more controversial and entertaining. Coca-Cola hired
talent agency CAA to enlist top-flight Hollywood directors
to make commercials. Candies features a woman sitting
on a toilet in its magazine ads (for shoes!). Spike Lee's
ad agency did more than fifty million dollars in billings
last year.
Of course, as the commercials try harder
to get your attention, the clutter becomes even worse.
An advertiser who manages to top a competitor for the
moment has merely raised the bar. Their next ad will have
to be even more outlandish in order to top the competition,
not to mention their previous ad, to keep the consumer's
attention.
The cost of making a first-rate TV commercial
is actually far more, per minute, than a major Hollywood
motion picture. Talking frogs, computer graphics and intense
editing now seem to be a requirement.
A side effect of the focus on entertainment
is that it gives the marketer far less time to actually
market. In a fifteen second commercial (increasingly attractive
as a cost-cutting way to interrupt people even more often),
ten or even twelve seconds are devoted to getting your
attention, while just a few heartbeats are reserved for
the logo, the benefit and the call to action.
Take the interruption challenge! Write down
all the companies who ran commercials during your favorite
TV show last night. Write down all the companies that
paid good money to buy banners on the Web during your
last surfing expedition. If you can list more than ten
percent of them, you're certainly the exception.
(3) The third approach used to keep mass
marketing alive is to change ad campaigns more often in
order to keep them "interesting and fresh." Tony the Tiger
and Charlie Tuna and the Marlboro man are each worth billions
of dollars in brand equity to the companies that built
them. The marketers behind them have invested a fortune
over the last forty years, making them trusted spokesmen
(or spokes animals) for their brands.
Nike, on the other hand, just ran a series
of ads without the swoosh, arguably one of the most effective
logos of the last generation. Apple Computer changes its
tagline annually. Wendy's and McDonald's and Burger King
jump from one approach to the other, all hoping for a
holy grail that captures attention.
In exchange for these brief bits of attention
(remember the hoopla when they replaced Mikey on the Life
box?) these marketers are trading in the benefits of a
long term brand recognition campaign. It's a trade they're
willing to make, because Interruption Marketing requires
it. Without attention, there is no ad.
(4) The fourth and last approach, which
is as profound as the other three, is that many marketers
are abandoning advertising and replacing it with direct
mail and promotions. Marketers now allocate about 52%
of their annual ad budgets for direct mail and promotions,
a significant increase over past years.
Of the more than $200 billion spent on consumer
advertising last year in the US, more than $100 billion
was spent on direct mail campaigns, in-store promotions,
coupons, free standing inserts and other non-traditional
media. Last year alone Wunderman, Cato, Johnson, did more
than $1.6 billion in billings for its clients (folks like
AT&T).
The next time you get a glossy mailing for
a Lexus, or enter an instant win sweepstakes at the liquor
store, you're seeing the results of this trend toward
increased direct marketing efforts. Advertisers are using
them because they work. They are somewhat more effective
at interrupting you than an ad. They're somewhat more
measurable than a billboard. Best of all, they give the
marketer another tool to use in their increasingly frustrating
fight against clutter. After all, there are only five
or ten pieces of junk mail in your mailbox every day-not
3,000. And another few feet of shelf space at the supermarket
can lead to a dramatic upturn in sales.
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6. DIRECT MARKETING BREAKS THROUGH
THE CLUTTER, TEMPORARILY.
Even though they work better than advertising,
these techniques are astonishingly wasteful. A 2% response
for a direct mail campaign will earn the smart marketer
a raise at most companies. But a 2% response means that
the same campaign was trashed, ignored or rejected by
an amazing 98% of the target audience! From the perspective
of the marketer, however, if the campaign earns more than
it costs, it's worth doing again.
Of course, just as suburbanites learned
when they fled the city to avoid the crowds, if a strategy
works, other people will be right on your heels. That
bucolic countryside rapidly fills up with other people
looking to get away from it all. Correspondingly, as each
of these promotional media becomes measurably effective,
every smart marketer rushes to join in. Finding a unique
approach that cuts through the clutter is usually very
short lived.
Virtually every supermarket now charges
a shelving allowance, for example, which manufacturers
pay for if they want more shelf space for their products.
Every liquor store is already jammed with promotions.
Every mailbox in the country is brimming with catalogs
for clothes, gardening equipment and fountain pens.
Direct marketers are responding to this
glut by using computers. With access to vast amounts of
computerized customer information, marketers can collate
and cross-reference a database of names to create a finely-tuned
mailing list, and then send them highly targeted messages.
For example, a direct marketer might discover that based
on past results, the best prospects for its next campaign
are single women who are registered Democrats,
who make more than $58,000 a year and have no balance
on their credit card. This information is easily available,
and marketers are now racing to make their direct marketing
ever more targeted.
Of course, database marketing is a weapon
available to any marketer, so like all trends in Interruption
Marketing, this one will soon lose its edge. When others
jump in as well, the clutter will inevitably catch up.
The last frontier of Interruption Marketing
appears to be exemplified by the movie Titanic.
James Cameron showed the world that outspending any rational
marketer will indeed cut through the clutter. Hollywood
has jumped on this bandwagon with marketing campaigns
for Godzilla and other films that at first glance,
can't possibly bring in enough ticket sales to justify
the expense.
Nike uses the same approach to sell sneakers,
and now this radical overspending strategy is being used
by others, especially on the internet. The thinking behind
it is based on an all or nothing roll of the dice. Basically,
because clutter is so pervasive, anyone who can successfully
break through and create a new mass market product will
reap huge rewards. And betting vast amounts of other people's
money on that breakthrough is one way to play.
Of course, once there's a proven pattern
that big spending can win, others in the category will
jump in as well. The bar will be raised yet again, and
the only winners will be the media companies that sell
the air time and ad space in the first place.
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7. WHY AD AGENCIES DON'T WORK TO
SOLVE THE PROBLEM
What about the ad agencies? With so many
talented people, why aren't they working to solve this
problem?
Unfortunately, the clutter wars are taking
their casualties at the agency side as well. The big agencies,
the ones who could afford to take the lead in this challenge,
are faced with three dismal problems:
(1) First, clients are giving the agencies
a much shorter leash. Leo Burnett used to keep clients
for twenty or thirty years. Levi's stayed at FCB for 68
years. That's so long that not one person at either company
was probably born when the account work was started on
Levi's.
Today, however, it's not unusual for a marketer
to change agencies after two or three years. Companies
that fired their ad agencies in the last year include
Bank of America, Compaq, Goodyear, and many more.
(2) The second problem is that the stock
market has been conducive to agency consolidations. The
best way to make money in advertising today is to buy
ad agencies and take them public. As a result, some of
the best minds in the business have been focusing on building
agencies, not brands.
(3) And last, the commission structure that
every ad agency was built upon has been dramatically dismantled.
Traditionally, agencies were paid by media companies.
They got to keep 15% of all the ad money that the client
spent on ad space in the form of a commission from the
magazines and TV networks where they ran their ads. This
meant that big clients could generate huge profits for
the ad agencies, which funded work on new approaches to
advertising as well as the innovative ads for new, smaller
clients. But now the big guys have decided to put a stop
to this subsidizing, and it's rare to find an ad agency
who still gets a straight 15% commission on media buys
for their big clients.
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8. INTERRUPTION MARKETERS FACE A CATCH 22
To summarize the problem that faces the
Interruption Marketer:
1. Human beings have a finite amount
of attention.
You can't watch everything, remember everything, or do
everything. As the amount of noise in your life increases,
the percentage of messages that get through inevitably
decreases.
2. Human beings have a finite amount
of money.
You also can't buy everything. You have to choose. But
because your attention is limited, you'll only be able
to choose from those things you notice.
3. The more products offered, the less
money there is to go around.
It's a zero sum game. Every time you buy a Coke, you don't
buy a Pepsi. As the number of companies offering products
increases, and as the number of products each company
offers multiplies, it's inevitable that there will be
more losers than winners.
4. In order to capture more attention
and more money, Interruption Marketers must increase spending.
Spending less money than your competitors on advertising
in a cluttered environment inevitably leads to decreased
sales.
5. But this increase in marketing exposure
costs big money.
Interruption marketers have no choice but to spend a bigger
and bigger portion of their company's budgets on breaking
through the clutter.
6. But, as you've seen, spending more
and more money in order to get bigger returns leads to
ever more clutter.
7. Catch-22: The more they spend, the
less it works. The less it works, the more they spend.
Is mass marketing due for a cataclysmic
shakeout? Absolutely. A new form of marketing is
changing the landscape, and it will affect interruption
marketing as significantly as the automobile affected
the makers of buggy whips.
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