Space abhors a vacuum and evidently marketers have similar sentiments about blank spaces without some sort of commercial message.
Today, brand marketers are looking to find a way to break through the clutter of thousands of ad messages that deluge consumers daily. The result is ads are everywhere including cell phones, the insides of elevators, on the drop-down dining trays in airplanes, on eggs, digital billboard signs, video screens in taxi cabs, etc.
According to Yankelovich, a person living in a U.S. city today sees more than two and a half times the number of ad messages a day than someone living in the same place 30 years earlier.
Marketers know that consumers would like some relief from the constant barrage but that isn't likely to change anything.
"We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere," Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, told The New York Times. "Ubiquity is the new exclusivity."
Marketers are starting to get some pushback from communities. In Houston, Barbara Thomason, president of the Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce, expressed concerns over billboards being converted to digital screens that are capable of having messages changed frequently. "They're making our community look like Las Vegas," she said. "The word 'trashy' has been used."
Some marketers contend the problem isn't about the number of messages but the quality. If an ad is entertaining, they say, then consumers welcome them.
"No one wants to annoy the consumer," said Bill Bean, director of trade insight at Miller Brewing Company. "However, there are many annoying ads that sell products, and it's very difficult to tell what annoys one consumer and what pleases another."
Discussion Questions: Are consumers more or less receptive to advertising messages today than in the past? Which of the many ad vehicles do you think holds the greatest promise for marketers to actually break through the clutter?