Forget Enron... The Biggest Scam is Still to be Exposed!

Author: Paul Ashby

| Posted: 23-02-2007 | Comments: 0 | Views: 29 | Rating: (52)

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As you may already have ascertained, it is our view that current, conventional advertising has been beset with problems from the very beginnings. Probably the principal problem advertising has is …accountability. Or rather the lack of it!

As we have said before, the real differences that exist between competing products is frequently perceived as no longer significant.

The result is that it is not self evident just what an advertiser has to sell that is so different and worthy of consideration.

Therefore, if no significant point of difference is apparent, why is that product more deserving of the customer’s money than any other?

It was partially because of this that we have seen a dramatic rise in the acceptance of own-label products and now services, in this country as elsewhere.

Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and so on, all developed their own-label offerings and the manufacturers, along with their agencies observing on the sidelines, sat back and let them do it.

In some cases they were complicit in doing so.

Now own-label has become so acceptable to consumers that they not only cover grocery products and with a differentiation between value and premium, the brand extensions encompass, motor insurance, home insurance, life cover and a multitude of offers that did not exist only a few years ago.

And it is unlikely to stop there. Sainsbury’s have at the time of writing, announced plans to enter the scratchcard market as a rival to Camelot, despite being an outlet for the purchase of the latter’s own scratchcards.

It is also interesting to note that we are now subjected to messages that not only extol the virtues of branded products, they even go so far as to make a point that certain companies do not make own-label, to justify their premium pricing.

You have to take your hat off to the ad man who came up with that little gem of building a campaign out of that one.

Sadly, for the client, the horse had already bolted. But the ad men, as usual, were pocketing their fees and laughing all the way to the bank!

It is no surprise then that with more and more competition, now including own label, there has been a significant increase in the number of advertisements, vying for customers’ attention.

So, more competition in the marketplace and more competition to attract the viewer/reader to engage with the message, so what’s the solution?

“We don’t show many Clients this…” is a statement we have actually heard in the agency environment, (& didn’t we all think that agencies were a service industry there to tell their Clients everything in their best interests!).

Here is an example of what they are not telling. It is from America but we see no reason why it should be any different in any marketplace. The research questioned whether the expensively produced advertisements shown on TV were actually getting anywhere.

The figures began with the average numbers of hours Americans watch TV each week – forty-seven.

This consisted then, of forty-three and a half-hours of network, local independent or cable TV, two and three-quarters hours of playback of recorded video, and fifty minutes of pre-recorded rented or bought video.

Those figures applied to the average home in the average week.

Out of that time, TV provided seven and a half hours of commercials however because of zapping – or people talking or going to the bathroom, and all the other things that people choose to do when the commercials come on, the seven and a half hours falls to one hour twenty-seven minutes of commercials actually seen.

Translated that means that each individual sees about 120 television advertisements a week. The Networks average about 4,000 commercials a week.

So let’s emphasise because these are true figures that demonstrate why the advertising industry waste is bigger than Enron, only 120 advertisements are seen each week by the average viewer!

Is this an isolated piece of research? If only.

The Royal Mail in the UK commissioned research that produced a similar picture. It showed that more that a quarter of the people who had watched an edition of News at Ten had seen none of the commercials. Great news? Not so. Of the remaining 75%, 26% simply hadn’t paid attention, 21% had made a drink, 20% left the room, 11% were preoccupied with other things, 8% switched channel, 6% went to the bathroom and 5% talked to someone!

It is clear from the likes of the above that TV advertising is not seen by many of the audience out there.

However the advertising industry tries to get around this by quoting reach and frequency.

OK not everyone views at the same time but run enough ads and this will counter this. Does this really hold true?

As we have already talked about the majority of the ads that are ‘seen’ very often, never ‘break through’.

The human mind cannot give weight to everything that comes its way; the brain decides not to bother with most ads at all, or, if it does, it rapidly forgets them.

Remember, the client who told us that every adult in this country is subject to 3,000 advertising messages every day and that was then now talk is of in excess of 8,000!

According to Consumer Behaviour, an industry textbook, “Only about one third of those commercials a person is exposed to, make any active impression in the memory.

Of those which make any impact, only about half are correctly comprehended and fewer than 5% are actively recalled for as long as twenty-four hours.”

And we thought Enron was the biggest business scandal ever!

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Article Tags: Advertising, Brain, Solution, Scam, Accountability, Enron, Own-label, Branded Products, Premium Pricing

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Paul Ashby has invested over £5 million in independent research, this research proves conclusively that interactive "Events" properly executed are far more effective that the "reach and frequency model preached by advertising agencies. Would you like to discover more about the benefits of using interactive communication? Please contact Paul on paul.ashby@yahoo.com or simply visit http://effectiveaccountablecommunication.blogspot.com

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Forget Enron... The Biggest Scam is Still to be Exposed!

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