Diagnosis: Obsessive Branding Disorder (Symptom #1 -- Volume)

As the author of Obsessive Branding Disorder, a new book about the excesses of marketing, one of the most common questions I get from the media goes a little like this: "Aren't today's marketers just doing the same stuff they've been doing since the 1950s?"

It's a silly question for a number of reasons. In light of how much I hear it, I'm going to explore a few of the answers over my next few posts. Today, Reason #1: Volume -- a blinding glimpse of the obvious.

"In 2006 U.S. advertisers spent nearly $300 billion -- about $10,000 a second -- trying to reach us. More alarming than the annual total is the overall trend. Advertisers have spent more in the past decade than they did in the four previous decades combined. In 1996 ad spending in the United States was estimated at $175 billion, almost half the amount of today's advertising costs."

The passage is from page 99 of my book, in the chapter titled Ad Creep. Despite looking at them for as long as I have, the numbers are still staggering. Marketers have doubled their spending in the past ten years alone... and still, some people doubt that marketing has changed in recent decades. Even if marketing psychology hadn't evolved (and it has; we'll get to that in subsequent posts) it's impossible to ignore the increase in volume. According to David Shenk's Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, the average American encountered 560 ads a day in 1971. Most estimates today put the number at about 5,000. That's ten times as many ads in just one generation. The upshot? 65% of Americans feel "constantly bombarded" with ads (there's a good statistical roundup here).

Of course, the true impact of the rise in advertising is felt socially, not statistically. Desperate to capture our attention, advertisers are everywhere we turn. Spam and junk mail are soaring. Product placement in TV and film is skyrocketing. School buses, beach sand, Porta Potties, weddings, body parts, babies' names -- nothing is off limits. Marketing is increasingly incorporated into our public, private, and spiritual lives, hanging a price tag on everything we see.

Why have we tolerated it? Mostly because we've grown slowly inured. That's why it's called "ad creep" and not "ad blitz" or "ad rush" -- consumers won't swallow a massive sudden influx of advertising, but they will accept marketing's gradual encroachment into the world around them. "It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising chatter." That's Herbert Hoover, US Commerce Secretary at the time, fighting to keep radio airwaves free of ads back in 1922. Today, some radio stations devote nearly 1/3 of their airtime to commercials. In recent months, Jonathon Adelstein and Andy Burnham, media watchdogs at the US's FCC and the UK's Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, respectively, have echoed Hoover about another type of ad creep -- product placement. But with some shows already airing as many as five product placements a minute, it's likely Adelstein and Burnham will have as much success holding back the tide as Hoover did in the 1920s.

So for those who argue that advertising hasn't really changed in the past fifty years, try giving the advertisers just what they've been asking for: a little bit of your attention. Take a fresh look at the gross volume of ads saturating our daily lives. Then consider where we're headed in the next fifty years.

Comments

[Cathexis]

At what point do they reach a threshold where the entertainm­ent/inform­ational benefit just isn't worth "wading through the advertising?"

Or maybe that is a continuum, as well. I know my television watching has been steadily declining over the past 20 years -- mostly because the "quality" of what I was watching no longer justified my time and energy -- or the tedium of ads.

In addition, too many ads have become intellectually insulting. I, for one, am offended when a car company tries to sell its "sexiness" or "image" while providing **** in actual quality (e.g., fuel efficiency).

[January]

When advertising was young, it was promoted by allowing it as a tax write-off. Times have changed. Take away the cost write-off. Then we'd have some advertising based on it's capacity to aid sales. Today it's an ego thing, like embroidering initials on towels. Yes, we are drowning in it because it doesn't cost anything (except to individual tax payers). How about a few statistics correlating corporate profit with ad revenues? Until the tax write-off is mentioned, advertisers can lie and argue we need them.

[lovethebomb]

With my late adoption of the DVR and Podcasts, I do not suffer the arrows of ads any longer. Try as they might, their incessant rabid chatter has receded into mute oblivion. Sometimes, when fast forwarding through ads in the DVR, I will look at an especially clever commercial, but that's about it. I never could tolerate ads on radio. One must have an extremely desensitized brain to listen to 1/3 ads per hour. I always muted commercials like a religion before I got the DVR, but was forced to watch images. No longer. Technology has freed us from ad tyranny at last.

[wendy82551]

I swear, I'm going to strangle the next person who uses "brand" in a sentence, and they're NOT talking about cattle. Every single idiot individual I know now suddenly has a "brand." We've reached what's been called "the tipping point" and now we're ALL products.

Good article!