Media Vent
By Bob Sacks
About Bob
Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.
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Selling Our Principles at Every Turn
What am I ranting about? It is the total abuse and saturation of advertising, marketing and branding. We, as an industry, have put a damn "pitch" on everything. It seems that advertising and marketing may have now killed the golden goose. There is now damn near nothing that isn't festooned with ads, attempts to brand or in-your-face intrusions to sell, sell, sell.
The public is now voting with its wallets, and I think that what they want and might be willing to pay for are "advertising free zones"—a simple little place of peace where you can see a movie, read a book, listen to a CD, drive in your car, ride a train, even read a magazine without being harangued, screamed at, cajoled, flirted with or some other totally intrusive and empty come-on.
As an industry, we just over did it. There is advertising in bathrooms, at gas pumps, in the sky on blimps, on the roads with moving ad-mobiles. I can't think of any place outside of my home without some scheming marketer attempting to get my attention.
What have we succeeded in doing? I think at best we have so numbed the public and taught them by constant attack the skill set to ignore us. It seems like all the screaming at them has worked. We got their attention, and they are very willing to avoid the haranguing, and us.
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Add to the density the notion that the vast majority of the messages are based in "fear". Fear that I will not be accepted because or fear that that I will ....
Be it products or politics, the short term gain for some will contribute to a long term reaction that at some pont will revolt.
And while a little revolution is good, once in a while, collataral damage will be messy.
You're just noticing this? Twenty years ago my wife and I took annual birding trips to Chincoteague Island. The roadway from the mainland to the Assateague barrier island is punctuated by a series of 50 or 60 billboards sunk into the marsh at 50 yard intervals. Those billboards have been there for 50 years. A naturalist who records wild sounds with ultra-sensitive parabolic microphones concluded five years ago that there were only two places in the United States where he could set up his recording equipment and not pick up the sound of an engine of some kind.