is inserted into advertising.
ADVERTISING: FROM MASS MARKETING TO SEGMENTED TARGETING
Advertising and marketing on a broad scale began in the 1950s with the advent of television. At that time, most people had access to a handful of national broadcast television networks plus a few local channels. Television programs targeted a broad audience, and advertisers spent the bulk of their budgets on these shows because there was really no other choice. The only competition in terms of getting a sales message in front of a large audience was radio, as well as perhaps newspapers and magazines, but these did not have the advantage of sight and sound, nor did they reach the millions of viewers that television provided.
In the nascent stage of television, producers and advertisers worked together to create television shows and then paid for an hour of time to air those programs on a network. These were shows like Texaco Star Theater or The Colgate Comedy Hour. The television and advertising industries were so intertwined, in fact, that the networks scheduled their programming based on when Detroit introduced their new cars: new car launches were in September, and so was the new fall television season. This was mass advertising through mass media.
By the early 1960s, networks created their own programming (or paid others to do so) and began to sell commercial space to advertisers, thus creating the advertising format we see today: television shows broken up with discrete commercial “pods” that include several commercials by different sponsors. This change was in response to the rising cost of television production, as well as to the game show scandals of the late 1950s. The most well-known of these cases involved a game show called Twenty One, where producers fed answers to more attractive contestants at the behest of their advertiser, Geritol. This became a notorious example of a trusted media source (TV) lying to its audience. We might even call it a fatal early misstep in content marketing. Even with these issues, sponsored programming like The Hallmark Hall of Fame continued, but it became the exception.
In terms of advertising messages themselves, starting as early as the 1920s marketers began to move beyond promoting products based on simple attributes (XYZ laundry detergent gets clothes cleaner because it has special ingredients, or ABC toothpaste gets your teeth whiter and brighter because it contains baking soda) to attaching a user benefit to the product (cleaner clothes will help you get a better job and whiter teeth will get you a husband or wife). Appealing to the psyche to sell products continues today, though the methods used have gone through several iterations over the decades. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, for example, there were two competing schools of thought about how best to get consumers to buy: the rational, or hard sell, versus the heart, or soft sell. The hard sell was based on differentiating products from their competitors by devising a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)—a simple phrase or tagline that would establish a brand as better than that of their competitors—a concept created by adman Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency. “M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hands” differentiated the candy as something that kids could eat without making a mess, and the line was used for decades. Key to this concept was to repeat the idea over and over and over until consumers could parrot the phrase back to the marketer, or more importantly, remember the sales message when they were standing in the aisle of their local store. USPs are still part of modern advertising, and we see this in taglines like “Expect More, Pay Less” for Target or “15 Minutes Could Save You 15 Percent or More on Car Insurance” for Geico. You might even be envisioning the little green gecko.
Alternatively, the soft sell, which was advocated by famous admen David Ogilvy and Chicago’s Leo Burnett, sold products through emotional appeals. David Ogilvy is famous for Dove (“1/4 cleansing cream”), “Schweppervescence,” and “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” among many others. Leo Burnett is well known for his use of characters, like the Marlboro Man, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and Charlie the Tuna. Burnett understood that people connect with a person—even a fictitious one—more than they do with a string bean or a can of tuna fish, and that this connection would lead to product sales. We see this idea continue today in products like Virgin, which built their brand around CEO Richard Branson, a character if there ever was one! Online, where engaging with the customer is a personalized one-on-one experience, brands-as-people and people-as-brands have multiplied. Think here of Steven Jobs and Apple, or Progressive Insurance and Flo, or Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, or Beyonce. The difference in the early days of TV, however, was that whether the method used involved USP or cartoonish spokespeople, the appeal was designed to attract everyone: young, old; male, female; rich and not-so-rich.
The late 1960s and early 1970s brought the Creative Revolution in advertising. Commercials and print ads became more sophisticated, more tongue-in-cheek in order to appeal to an increasingly educated baby boomer audience. Rather than banging consumers over the head with the repetitious messages of the USP or seeing the Marlboro Man on yet another prairie, consumers were presented with ads like “Lemon” for Volkswagen and “You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Love Levy’s” for Levy’s Rye Bread. At this time, psychologists became integrated into industry practices so that marketers could learn what emotional buttons to push in order to get us to buy. Focus groups, surveys, and personal interviews were used to ascertain the motivations behind consumer purchases. Today these methods have expanded to include ethnography, a technique whereby researchers trail consumers in their “natural habitat,” often following them with video cameras to record every nuance. Researchers for Nickelodeon, for example, will move into a child’s home for a few days and look in their closets to see what they actually buy and watch what media they interact with. Similarly, there are firms that specialize in marketing ethnography, such as ReD Associates, whose observers attend parties to learn consumers’ vodka drinking behaviors or spend a day with consumers on behalf of sneaker brand Adidas, trying to understand the obstacles that keep them from working out.22 This type of anthropological work is supported and expanded online through data analytics, which we will discuss later in the book.23
Understanding what motivates consumers to buy is useless, however, unless advertisers can connect that learning to their product and unless that product provides a corresponding emotional benefit. This is where branding comes in. Branding, quite simply, is the use of a recognizable logo, a tagline (though not always), and a mythology.24 A sneaker isn’t a running shoe; it is a Nike and the athletic excellence that embodies. Disney isn’t a theme park; it is magic. Coca-Cola isn’t a sugary carbonated beverage; it is happiness. For example, while in the past Coca-Cola would create a commercial and teach the world to sing in “perfect har-mon-y,” today they convey the same essence through the “Happiness Machine,” a video that shows college students being delighted and surprised by receiving not one but several bottles of Coke from a vending machine. As the video progresses, hands appear out of the machine to deliver first a bouquet of flowers, then balloon animals, and then a several-foot-long hero sandwich. One student even says about the vending machine, “I want to give it a hug,” and “Thank you, Coke.” Just like the earlier commercial, millions of people saw this video.
The connection of a commodity product to a story or an idea that will evoke emotion—“I want to give it a hug”—is what marketing is all about. These emotional connections become attached to a visual image that you immediately recognize—the swoosh, Cinderella’s castle, a red and white logo—and as soon as you see the symbol, it instantly conjures up memories of your interactions with these products. This is particularly important in a media environment that has become overwhelmed with competing product messages. Estimates are that we see upwards of 5,000 marketing messages per day.25 We are not conscious of all of these, for sure, but the ones that do make it through the mental clutter are those that have the most emotional and psychological relevance. I may remember Banana Republic and Fage and Chipotle, but Abercrombie and Dannon and McDonald’s, not so much. You likely have a different experience. This is incredibly important for marketers because research has shown that as the media fragment and products proliferate, consumers reduce the number of brands they consider when buying a product. We are too busy to find something new, so we stay with what we know.26
As
