Advertising in the Trenches
Reaching the overstimulated consumer
by Jenie Skoy
Meet Joe, your typical American consumer. Joe wakes up to Crazy
Eddy on the radio, selling everyone’s favorite holiday cheese ball.
During the TV morning news and the daily commute, the advertising
assault continues. Even the billboards get a little presumptuous —
telling Joe where to get gas and buy food, and even encouraging him
to donate his organs. By the end of the day, Joe has become glassyeyed to the blare, glare, glitter and pop of traditional advertising.
Armed with this awareness, savvy advertising execs are funneling
more of their clients’ money into new forms of advertising to catch
consumers like Joe off guard.
“Consumers are hiding from us,” says Mark Hurst, president of W
Communications. “We’ve always been intrusive — we interrupt their
mail, radio, television.” Hurst believes that the cutting edge of
marketing must become even sharper because consumers are
controlling their modes of communication more than ever — rather
than listening to the radio, they are file-sharing on Napster or
recording their favorite programs on TiVo. “We are having to reach
people one at a time and often in the trenches.” Hurst calls this
phenomenon “narrow casting” instead of broadcasting: (reaching the
one instead of the masses) and reports that W Communications
spends up to 30 percent of their clients’ money on nontraditional
advertising. He sees a similar trend locally and nationally.
Other marketing gurus agree. Alan Sandomir, marketing professor at
the University of Utah echoes this idea, “There is too much clutter, too
many ads, too many choices and media connections. We are overstimulated; there’s no way for a product to have good recognition.” He
believes that combined marketing efforts have hypnotized consumers.
And in order to wake consumers up, advertisers must “slap them out
of their hypnoidal state.”
Ways advertisers are attempting to “wake” consumers include catching
them off-guard with stunts or “befriending” them by sending out
marketing messages under the guise of personal e-mails. One Utah
company even went on the road from British Columbia to the Grand
Canyon with a bus full of motocross hot-shots to help their company
carve its niche into the action sports industry.
Turning Up the Buzz
Among the many spam messages and personal e-mails circulated each
day, once in a while one gets passed along because of its sheer hilarity
or audacity. When advertisers take advantage of this phenomenon, it’s
called “viral advertising.” “It’s like an unintentional pyramid scheme,”
says Hurst.
“People are sending these unbelievably wacky creative things. They
are successful because the product is so good you want to share it.”
And if a marketing message is worthy of being forwarded, it grows
exponentially, and without the price tag of traditional ad placement
(TV commercials, prints ads).
Taking advantage of the natural momentum of an e-mail chain is one
way to create buzz; another is orchestrating a stunt to elicit public
recognition. Local advertising agency Riester-Robb helped promote
public transit in Santa Cruz last summer by hosting a “Commuter Idol”
contest where commuters auditioned to perform a stunt on their daily
ride to work. One commuter sang; another brought donuts for the
entire bus. Fellow commuters even helped select the number one
Commuter Idol by logging onto a site and voting for the best stunt.
The typically stale web site for transit was boosted from a daily
average of 2,000 hits to 13,000 hits, and the event was covered at
least seven times by local newspapers. Overall, says Jim Dissett,
director of public relations at Riester-Robb, the promotions event was
a great success. The reason? “Customers like interacting with the
product much more than something passive.”
Playing with the Big Boys
How far would you go to help your business grow? How about 2,000
feet off a cliff in the Grand Canyon? If you think promoting peril to
market your product is going too far, talk to OGIO, a Bluffdale-based
designer and manufacturer of sports bags. They do it readily.
In the fall of 2001, with the intention of becoming a key player in the
action sports industry, OGIO financed the movie “Global Addiction,”
which featured motocross superstar Travis Pastrana’s famous jump
into the Grand Canyon. Many of OGIO’s staff traveled with the movie’s
action sports stars, living and breathing their world. The message it
sent to those in the high-adrenaline industry was that OGIO was a
company that understood them. The leaders of OGIO are convinced
that if they hadn’t embraced the lifestyle of the action sports expert,
they would not have captured a huge segment of consumer spending.
“We were chasing the 12- to 26-year-old demographic,” says OGIO
President David Wunderli. “And that demographic is driven by action
sports.”
Wunderli describes the demographic as a group that doesn’t want to
be affiliated with corporate names. “They want the experts in the
industry to decide what is cool. They don’t want a brand that is found
in JCPenney’s or Target. They want the brand that lives their world.
[Our demographic] loves the companies that are started in a garage
with their buddies. Becoming ‘core’ or ‘authentic’ with that
demographic — that’s the most important thing to do,” says Wunderli.
Before making “Global Addiction,” OGIO was relatively unknown in the
world of power sports, but in the three years since then has become
one of the most recognized brands in the motocross industry and the
official sponsor of the Gravity Games (the world series of action
sports). They credit their growth to demonstrating loyalty to the
industry.
Other advertising experts recognize what OGIO has accomplished with
their marketing approach. “They are not spending money in the
mainstream media, they are insinuating products into the minds and
the hearts of consumers by using things they are interested in,” says
Bill Cutting, president of New Moon Media. He believes marketing
strategies must match the attitudes of those marketed to, and that
Generation X and Y will affiliate with brands that are represented in an
innovative way.
“The last thing they are going to do is attach themselves to a product
that is marketed in a traditional way. They don’t like to think that they
are doing it in that horribly outdated-way that was done in the past,”
he says.