The Martin Agency and its client Wrangler are gambling that they can improve blue jeans sales buy charming consumers with a couple of quiet, sentimental stories about fathers, sons, old dogs, freshwater fishing, and pickup trucks.
Mike Hughes, creative director at the Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia, believes his agency has crafted Wrangler's sales message in a fashion that will work because it is timeless. "It's very hard for advertisers to keep up with consumers today," says Hughes. "Consumers build for tresses. Advertisers try to break them down. And consumers build up ever-stronger ones."
The techniques that have ruled ad-making over the last two decades are falling by the wayside as advertisers and their agencies come to grips with consumers' increasing sophistication about and resistance to advertising.
And many of the creative solutions we are seeing point toward an advertising that will likely be more arty, subdued, and intelligent than ever before. A kinder and gentler advertising.
The fact is we are supersaturated by advertising. Just consider the teeming media environment in which advertising reaches us - what the industry refers to as "clutter." Experts calculate that we're exposed to as many as six hundred advertising messages each day in the form of television and radio commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, yellow pages, product packaging, point-of-purchase displays, coupons, direct mail, posters, billboards, and transit signs.
Television commercials remain advertisers' favorite medium. In the course of a single week of TV-watching, a viewer is now assaulted by an average of 660 commercials. And that figure promises to double during the next ten years as the number of thirty-second commercials declines and the number of shorter messages - known in the ad business as ":10s" and ":15s" - grows.
Yet out of that vast ocean of appeals, advertising research shows, viewers typically remember only 1.25 commercial spots when asked to recall what they've seen.
Studies by Bevmark, Inc., a Los Angeles marked research firm, show that not only do 80 percent of consumers mistrust advertisements, but a large number also suffer from a definite form of "communications-related stress," driving many -consciously and otherwise - to block out commercial appeals as a means of relieving that stress.
According to Bob Garfield, who reviews TV commercials each week for the trade journal Advertising Age, the consumer's tolerance for advertising will continue plummeting.
Garfield explains that this will stem from the sheer overload of commercials in the future, a situation that will be brought about by the economics of buying broadcast time. For the past five years, 60-second commercials have been unaffordable to most advertisers; soon, 30-second ones will be too. "To paraphrase Andy Warhol, 'In the future, everything will be said in 15 seconds,'" says Garfield. "Advertisers - even if they learn how to speak to consumers effectively in 10-or 15-second bites - will still see their messages lost in the jumble of 190 other commercials every
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