Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [17]
By exploring viewers’ responses to one of the most popular TV shows in America, our first experiment would answer the first question I was posing—does product placement really work, or was it, despite what advertisers and consumers alike have long believed, a colossal waste of money?
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THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
Product Placement, American Idol, and Ford’s Multimillion-Dollar Mistake
REMEMBER THAT COMMERCIAL you saw on American Idol two nights ago? The one where the tractor salesman was scarfing down those fish sticks, and that kind-of-funny cell phone ad with those two quacking ducks…
Yeah, me neither. As a matter of fact, I don’t even remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. Steak? Lasagna? Fettucine Alfredo? A Caesar salad? Maybe I forgot to eat. The point is, I can’t recall—just as I have no recollection of the third man who landed on the moon, or the fourth person who summited Mt. Everest.
By the time we reach the age of sixty-six, most of us will have seen approximately two million television commercials. Time-wise, that’s the equivalent of watching eight hours of ads seven days a week for six years straight. In 1965 a typical consumer had a 34 percent recall of those ads. In 1990, that figure had fallen to 8 percent. A 2007 ACNielsen phone survey of one thousand consumers found that the average person could name a mere 2.21 commercials of those they had ever seen, ever, period.1 Today, if I ask most people what companies sponsored their favorite TV shows—say, Lost or House or The Office—their faces go blank. They can’t remember a single one. I don’t blame them. Goldfish, I read once, have a working memory of approximately seven seconds—so every seven seconds, they start their lives all over again. Reminds me of the way I feel when I watch TV commercials.
A couple of reasons for this jump out at me right away. The first and most obvious is today’s fast-moving, ever-changing, always-on media assault. The Internet with its pop-ups and banner ads, cable TV, twenty-four-hour news stations, newspapers, magazines, catalogs, e-mail, iPods, pod-casts, instant messaging, text-messaging, and computer and video games are all vying for our increasingly finite and worn-out attention spans. As a result, the filtering system in our brains has grown thick and self-protective. We’re less and less able to recall what we saw on TV just this morning, forget about a couple of nights ago.
Another no less important factor behind our amnesia is the pervasive lack of originality on the part of advertisers. Their reasoning is simple: If what we’ve been doing has worked for years, why shouldn’t we just keep on doing it? Which is a little like saying, if I’m a baseball player who’s been striking out regularly for the past decade, why should I bother changing my swing, or altering my stance, or gripping the bat a little differently? A few years ago, I conducted a small experiment—a little narrower in scope than my brain-scan experiment—on my own. I taped sixty different TV car commercials produced by twenty different automotive companies. Each one had been running on TV for the past two years. Each one had a scene in which the new, shiny, and seemingly driverless car guns its way around a hairpin turn in the desert, sending up a dramatic little cloud of dust—poof. The thing is, though the make of car might have differed, that scene was exactly the same in every single commercial. Same swerve. Same turn. Same desert. Same dust cloud. Just for fun, I created a montage of these breathtakingly unmemorable moments on a two-minute reel, to see if I could tell which car was a Toyota, a Nissan, a Honda, an Audi, or a Subaru. And indeed, when