Advertising

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Advertising

Advertising, the promotion of goods or services through the use of slogans, images, and other attention-getting devices, has existed for thousands of years, but by the late 1990s in the United States it had become ubiquitous, permeating almost every aspect of American life. Indeed, the most omnipresent trend was the placement of advertisements and logos on virtually any medium that could accommodate them. Advertising and brand logos appeared regularly on T-shirts, baseball caps, key chains, clothing, plastic cups and mugs, garbage cans, bicycle racks, parking meters, the bottom of golf cups, in public restrooms, on mousepads, in public school hallways, and, for schools fortunate enough to be located near major airports, on school rooftops. The quest for new advertising venues never stopped—advertising has been placed on cows grazing near a highway (in Canada), and on the edible skins of hot dogs.

Television screens became commonplace in many places where the audience was captive—doctor's offices, which were fed specialized health-related programs interspersed with commercials for health-related products, airports (fed by CNN's Airport Network), and supermarket checkout counters. Indeed, by 1998 place-based advertising, defined by advertising scholar Matthew P. McAllister in The Commercialization of American Culture as "the systematic creation of advertising-supported media in different social locations" had reached almost any space where people are "captive" and have little to distract them from the corporate plugs. Advertising had invaded even what was once regarded as private space—the home office, via the personal computer, where advertisements on Microsoft Windows "desktop" were sold for millions of dollars.

By 1998, almost all sporting events, from the high school to professional levels, had become advertising vehicles, and the link between sports and corporations had become explicit. Stadiums (San Francisco's 3Com stadium, formerly Candlestick Park), events (The Nokia Sugar Bowl, the Jeep Aloha Bowl), teams (the Reebok Aggie Running Club), awards (the Dr. Pepper Georgia High School Football Team of the Week, the Rolaids Relief Man award, for Major League Baseball's best relief pitcher), and even individual players had become, first and foremost, brand advertising carriers. Sports shoe manufacturers spent millions of dollars and competed intensely to have both teams and star players, at all levels of competitive sports, wear their shoes—as a basketball player wearing Nike shoes provided essentially a two-hour advertisement for the corporation each time the player appeared on television or in an arena.

It was not until the late 1800s that advertising became a major element of American life. Advertising had been a mainstay of U.S. newspapers beginning in 1704, when the first newspaper advertisement appeared. In the 1830s, new printing technologies led to the emergence of the "penny press," inexpensive city newspapers that were largely supported by advertising, rather than subscriptions. Until the late 1800s, however, most advertisements were little more than announcements of what merchant was offering what goods at what price. But in the late 1800s, the confluence of mass production, the trans-continental railway, and the telegraph necessitated what had before been unthinkable—a national market for products that could be promoted through national publications. Advertising promoted and branded products that had, until around 1910, been seen as generic commodities, such as textiles, produce, and coal.

At the same time, printing technology also advanced to a stage where it became possible to create visually appealing ads. Still, before the 1920s, advertising was, by current standards, fairly crude. Patent medicines were advertised heavily during the late 1800s, and the dubious claims made by advertisers on behalf of these products tainted the advertising profession. But, by the turn of the century, the new "science" of psychology was melded with advertising techniques, and within ten years advertising agencies—which had emerged in the late 1800s—and the men who worked for them began to gain some respectability as professionals who practiced the "science" of advertising and who were committed to the truth. After the successful application of some of these psychological principles during the U.S. Government's "Creel Committee" World War I propaganda campaigns, advertising became "modern," and advertising leaders strove to associate themselves with the best in American business and culture. Advertising men, noted advertising historian Roland Marchand in Advertising the American Dream, viewed themselves as "modernity's 'town criers.' They brought good news about progress." The creators of advertisements believed that they played a critical role in tying together producers and consumers in a vast, impersonal marketplace, in part by propagating the idea that modern products and ideas were, by their very newness, good. Advertising men, wrote Marchand, believed that "Inventions and their technological applications made a dynamic impact only when the great mass of people learned of their benefits, integrated them into their lives, and came to lust for more new products."

From the 1920s to the 1950s, advertisers and advertising dominated the major national media, both old (newspapers and magazines) and new (radio and television). The first radio advertisement was sent through the airwaves in 1922, and by the 1930s radio and its national networks—the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) were a firmly entrenched part of American life.

In the 1950s, television quickly became the medium of choice for national advertisers, and about 90 percent of all U.S. households had sets by 1960. After that, audiences became increasingly fragmented for all media and advertising soon became targeted to particular markets. Magazines and radio led the way in niche marketing. In the 1950s, these media were immediately threatened by television's mass appeal. Radio, whose programming moved to television, began offering talk shows and music targeted at specific audiences in the 1950s, and with the targeted programs came targeted advertising, including acne medicine ads for teens on rock 'n' roll stations and hemorrhoid ointment commercials for older people listening to classical music. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, magazines became increasingly specialized; such general-interest, mass-circulation magazines as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post first lost advertising support and circulation, and in the case of the first two, went out of business. Meanwhile, the number of special-interest magazines increased from 759 in 1960 to 2,318 in the early 1990s. These magazines appealed to smaller audiences that shared common interests—hobbies, sports, fashion, and music. By the 1970s sleeping bags could be advertised in Outside magazine, rock albums in Creem, and gardening implements in Herb Quarterly.

Up until the 1990s, advertisers still had a relatively well-defined task: to determine where money would best be spent based on four primary criteria: reach, or how many people could possibly receive the message; frequency, or how often the message could be received; selectivity, or whether the advertisement would reach the desired potential customers; and efficiency, or the cost (usually expressed in cost per thousand people). However, during the 1980s, changes in society (government deregulation during the Reagan era) and technological changes (the broad acceptance of VCRs, cable television, and remote controls) forced advertisers to seek out new venues and to embrace new techniques. As the media became increasingly more complex and fragmented, corporations footing the bill for advertising also demanded more specific data than ever before, to the point where, in the late 1990s, there were serious—and increasingly effective—attempts to measure whether a specific ad led to a specific purchase or action by a consumer.

Advertisers in the late 1990s sought to regain some of the control they lost in targeting ads on television. Before the 1980s, most major markets had half a dozen or so outlets—CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and one or two independent stations. In addition, remote controls and VCRs were uncommon. Viewers' choices were limited, changing the channel was difficult, and it was difficult to "zap" commercials either by channel "surfing" (changing channels quickly with a remote control) or by recording a program and fast-forwarding over ads. "Advertisers are increasingly nervous about this recent, if superficial, level of power audiences have over their electronic media viewing," wrote McAllister. "New viewing technologies have been introduced into the marketplace and have become ubiquitous in most households. These technologies are, in some ways, anti-advertising devices."

Cable television had also, by the late 1980s, become troublesome for advertisers, because some stations, like MTV and CNN Headline News, had broken up programs into increasingly short segments that offered more opportunities to skip advertising. Sports programming, an increasing mainstay of cable, also puzzled advertisers, because commercials were not regularly scheduled—viewers could switch between games and never had to view a commercial. Attempts to subvert viewer control by integrating plugs directly into the broadcast had some success—and one advertiser might sponsor an ever-present running score in one corner of the screen, while another would sponsor instant replays and a third remote reports from other games. These techniques were necessary, as at least one study conducted in the 1980s indicated that when commercials came on, viewership dropped by 8 percent on network TV and 14 percent on cable stations.

Cable television, which had existed since the 1950s as a means of delivering signals to remote communities, blossomed in the 1970s. Home Box Office (HBO), became, in 1972, the first national cable network. By 1980, 28 percent of U.S. households had cable television, and by 1993 this figure reached 65 percent. Cable, with the ability to provide up to 100 channels in most areas by the late 1990s, provided the means for niche marketing on television, and by the mid-1980s, advertisers took for granted that they could target television commercials at women via the Lifetime Network, teenagers through MTV, middle-class men through ESPN, blacks through BET, the highly educated through the Arts and Entertainment Network, and so on. Many advertisers found the opportunity to target specific audiences to be more cost-efficient than broadcasting to large, less well-defined audiences, because in the latter group, many viewers would simply have no interest in the product, service, or brand being pitched.

Advertising, in short, had a direct impact on television content. By the early 1990s, many individual programs had well-defined audiences, and could become "hits" even if they reached only a small portion of the potential general audience. For example, the WB network's Dawson's Creek, which debuted in 1998, only attracted nine percent of all viewers watching at the time it was broadcast, but it was considered a hit because it delivered a large teen audience to advertisers. Similarly, Fox's Ally McBeal achieved hit status by attracting only a 15 percent share of all viewers, because it appealed to a vast number of young women. These numbers would have been considered unimpressively small until the 1990s, but by then the demographics of the audience, rather than the size, had become all important to network marketers. In 1998, advertisers were paying between $75,000 and $450,000 for a 30-second commercial (depending on the show and the day and time it was broadcast), and demanded to know exactly who was watching. In the 1980s and 1990s, three new networks—Fox, UPN, and WB—had emerged to compete with the well-established CBS, NBC, and ABC, and succeeded by targeting younger viewers who were attractive to certain advertisers.

Despite strong responses to the many challenges advertisers faced, some groups remained elusive into the 1990s. People with active lifestyles were often those most desired by advertisers and could be the most difficult to reach. Non-advertising supported entertainment—pay cable (HBO, Showtime), pay-per-view, videos, CDs, laser disks, CD-ROMS, video games, the Internet, etc.—was readily available to consumers with the most disposable income. As opportunities to escape advertising increased, it paradoxically became more difficult to do so, as corporate and product logos found their way to the most remote places on earth. For example, outdoor gear manufacturer North Face provided tents for Mount Everest expeditions; these tents were featured in the popular IMAX film "Everest"; corporate logos like the Nike "swoosh" were embedded on every article of clothing sold by the company, making even the most reluctant individuals walking billboards who both carried and were exposed to advertising even in the wilderness.

As advertising proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, so did its guises. Movie and television producers began to charge for including products (product placement) in films and programs. In exchange for money and tie-ins that plugged both the film and product, producers displayed brands as props in films, excluding competing brands. One of the most successful product placements was the use of Reese's Pieces in the movie E.T. (1982), which resulted in a sales increase of 85 percent. In Rocky III, the moviegoer saw plugs for Coca-Cola, Sanyo, Nike, Wheaties, TWA, Marantz, and Wurlitzer. Critics viewed such advertising as subliminal and objected to its influence on the creative process. The Center for the Study of Commercialism described product placement as "one of the most deceitful forms of advertising." Product placement, however, was a way of rising above clutter, a way to ensure that a message would not be "zapped."

Identifying targets for ads continued, through the late 1990s, to become increasingly scientific, with VALS research (Values and Lifestyles) dividing audiences into categories such as "actualizers," "achievers," strivers," and "strugglers." Even one of the most traditional advertising methods, the highway billboard, had, in the 1990s, adapted sophisticated audience-identification techniques. One research firm photographed license plate numbers as cars drove by billboards, then matched the number with the car owner's address, which gave the advertisers an indication of income and class by neighborhood. Billboard advertisers also successfully identified geographic areas with high numbers of people matching the characteristics of a company's or product's best customers. For example, Altoids, a strong mint, had, in the late 1990s, a strong customer base among young, urban, and socially active adults, who were best reached by billboards. Altoids' advertising agency, Leo Burnett, identified 54 demographic and lifestyle characteristics of Altoids customers and suggested placing ads in neighborhoods where people with those characteristics lived, worked, and played. This was a wildly successful strategy, resulting in sales increases of 50 percent in the target markets.

By 1998, many businesses were having increasing success marketing to individuals rather than consumer segments. Combinations of computers, telephones, and cable television systems had created literally thousands of market niches while other new technologies facilitated and increased the number of ways to reach these specialized groups.

The most promising medium for individually tailored advertising was the Internet. Online advertising developed quickly; within five years of the invention of the graphical web browser in 1994, the Direct Marketing Association merged with the Association for Interactive Media, combining the largest trade association for direct marketers with the largest trade association for internet marketers. Advertisers tracked world wide web "page views" and measured how often Web surfers "clicked through" the common banner advertisements that usually led directly to the marketing or sales site of the advertiser. Many companies embraced the even more common medium of e-mail to successfully market to customers. For example, Iomega, a disk drive manufacturer, sent e-mail to registered customers about new products and received favorable responses. Online retailers such as bookseller Amazon.com touted e-mail announcements of products that customers had expressed interest in as a customer service benefit. Although internet advertising was still largely experimental in the late 1990s, many manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers recognized that web advertising was a necessary part of an overall marketing plan. Companies that provided audience statistics to the media and advertising industries struggled to develop trustworthy, objective internet audience measurement techniques.

—Jeff Merron