Marketing madness

E: The Environmental Magazine, May-June, 1996 by Laurie Ann Mazur

A few years ago, a company called Space Marketing, Inc. (SMI) came up with a plan to send a mile-long billboard into space. Coated with reflective plastic, the billboard would beam down a corporate logo that appeared as large as the moon, and as it orbited the Earth, would be visible to every single person on the planet.

To marketers, it was a dream come true: a truly inescapable form of advertising. It couldn't be tossed out with the junk mail, hung up on, or zapped with a remote control. To the rest of us who'd heard about it, it seemed more like a nightmare. Amid howls of protest, SMI withdrew the plan, but not before several companies had inquired about launching their logos into space.

Space may be the final frontier for advertisers - because the Earth is already taken. In the last 20 years, advertising has become far more pervasive than ever before. Advertising budgets in the United States have doubled since 1976, and they've grown by more than 50 percent in just the last 10 years. Companies now spend about $162 billion each year to bombard us with print and broadcast ads; that works out to about $623 for every man, woman and child in the United States. It's important to remember that we're the ones picking up the tab for ad costs, in the form of higher prices for the products the ads promote. We also pay higher taxes, because advertising costs are deductible from the bottom line of corporate taxable profits, which would otherwise be higher.

Skyrocketing ad budgets are both a cause and a consequence of a phenomenon marketers call "clutter," resulting from airwaves so clogged with ads already that it gets harder and harder to attract our attention. So, to prevail in this ad-cluttered world, marketers have become more intrusive than ever before.

They've also gotten more sneaky. In recent years, advertisers have pioneered many forms of "stealth" advertising - ads disguised as something else, or placed where we least expect to encounter them. One form of stealth advertising is "product placement" - paying to get brand-name products featured in movies. For large cash payments, advertisers can actually get scripts rewritten to showcase their products (see sidebar).

Another form of stealth advertising is the "video news release," or VNR, an insidious form of promotion indeed. Advertisers produce brief videotapes (VNRs) that look for all the world like regular news stories - except that they feature a product or a corporation. These are then distributed to news stations throughout the land, which typically air them without attribution. For example, a few years ago 17 million Americans watched a "news" story about the 50th anniversary of Cheerios cereal. It was a lighthearted bit of human-interest fluff, featuring a tour of the Cheerios factory and some footage of a giant Cheerio made specially for the occasion.

But few viewers realized that the story was conceived, dramatized, filmed and distributed by Cheerios manufacturer General Mills itself. VNRs give corporations an unparalleled opportunity to define and interpret current events, and they are cheaper than regular ads. So it is not surprising that VNRs have become increasingly common: A 1993 Nielsen study found that every single news station surveyed used VNRs - and less than half identified their source during the broadcast.

CORPORATE CULTURE

Also in response to clutter, advertisers have taken over more of what used to be ad-free (or at least ad-lite). Public broadcasting (PBS) stations now run sponsor acknowledgements (called "enhanced underwriting") that are virtually indistinguishable from ads on commercial TV. Museums have become shrines to the products of their corporate benefactors: Upscale shoemaker Ferragamo, for example, paid for an exhibit of its own shoes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Just about every cultural event has a corporate sponsor - and those sponsors have a lot of influence over their beneficiaries. Country singer Barbara Mandrell collected $15 million to promote No Nonsense pantyhose, and obligingly named her next album No Nonsense.

In fact, it's now possible to sponsor an entire American city. In 1993, the city of Atlanta hired Joel Babbitt, a former advertising executive, to help the city sell itself. Babbitt came up with a plan to rename streets and parks for corporate sponsors, implant ads in city sidewalks, and plaster corporate logos on the sides of city garbage trucks. To reassure those naysayers who thought he might be going too far, Babbitt announced that not just any corporate sponsor would be welcome - he would draw the line at firearms and sexual products. This was a great relief to those who envisioned products like "the official assault rifle of Atlanta" or condoms imprinted with the city seal.

DICTATING CONTENT

Yes, it's annoying and absurd - but advertising's takeover of our cultural airwaves is more than an aesthetic affront. It also affords corporations significant control over the content of the media that shape our world view. The news and entertainment media are wholly dependent on ad revenues, and advertisers wield considerable influence. In a 1992 study, virtually all of the 150 newspaper editors surveyed said that advertisers tried to dictate editorial content, and 37 percent said they succeeded.