Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [58]
Let’s find out.
The Daily Advertising Diary of an Average American Who Happens to Have Worked in Advertising for Twenty Years
October 18, 2007: In the shower from 5:30 to 5:45 a.m., I listened (or didn’t, which will probably be the most arbitrary and debatable aspect of this) to sports talk radio, thinking whether I should work out and how I was going to get anything done today with all the stuff going on—school drop-offs, visit Mom in the hospital, a nephew’s varsity football game, plus I had to create and build an entire haunted house for a kids’ party scheduled to start at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow. Still, I managed to remember this: The twenty-minute scores update was brought to me by Verizon Wireless (1). The traffic by TomTom (2). The weather by your Tristate BMW Dealers (3). Then there was some talk. Two of the hosts are having a diet contest, and one of them is getting his meals sent to him by a diet-food sponsor who happens to run ads on the show. There’s no way to confirm whether this product mention, or live read, is in fact paid for, but my well-tuned bullshit detector says yes, it is (4). However, when the hosts begin talking about the top story of the day, Joe Torre leaving the Yankees after twelve years as manager, I begin to wonder without further prompting about how this might affect Torre’s endorsement career—for instance, the Bigelow green tea spots he reads on this station all the time. I conclude that internally prompted messages by the subject and creator of this experiment do not count.
Reaching into my medicine cabinet for my shaving cream, I decide on another rule: the labels and logos of random products (shaving cream, cereal, small-batch Kentucky bourbon) lying about the house will not count, either. However, labels and logos purposely placed in advertising environments will count.
Here’s the difficult part: during my fifteen-minute shower and shave, there were other commercials on the radio, but the thing is, I can’t remember any of them. Did I hear them? I guess. Did they register? Not enough for me to so much as remember the brand, let alone the concept, even though I was sort of trying to at that point but hadn’t yet bothered to start carrying a notebook and pen. But I imagine on some insidious level they did register.
Anytime you hear or see a message, media planners call this an impression. And the theory goes that even if you say you didn’t see or hear a message, you did. And the more times that you’re exposed to it, the more it registers. So much so that after several weeks of playing, for instance, a thirty-second TV spot, brands will switch to a less expensive fifteen-or ten-second version of the same spot and get nearly the same level of recall. So let’s say there were four other messages in that fifteen-minute radio block. Since I listen to this station at the same time almost every morning, there’s a very good chance I’ve heard them more times than I would like to know. Let’s raise the impression total to eight.
Downstairs in the kitchen I turn on the countertop radio, preset for NPR’s Morning Edition. I listen to the news at the top of the hour while I take care of the dogs, brew some tea, make some lemon-and-honey water for my wife and me, and prepare for the day. National Public Radio: untainted by the stain of commercials, pure, free, and totally not-for-profit. No need for a pen and notebook now. But guess what? Today NPR is having a pledge drive (9). At least the local station I listen to is.
“The last half hour was brought to you by the law offices of…” (10).
“Thanks also for contributions by the Chevron Corporation (11), United Technologies (12), … and support from listeners like you (?).”
On my way to pick up the New York Times at the end of the driveway, I decide that the Times’s masthead logo doesn’t count