By the time any of us are laid to rest under our gravestones or have our ashes cast to the winds, we will have wasted years of our time above ground being captivated by advertising.
Why didn’t anyone warn us we would be forced to waste hours and hours of our lives on messages, images and information we never asked for? Not even our parents tried to help us — if they ever could.
Our parents taught us to always tell the truth, work hard, pay attention at school, eat healthy and practice safe sex. But they never tried to spare us from advertising — something as constant in our lives as the air we breathe and the landscapes we walk through.
So we end up being sold car insurance by a gecko lizard, only drinking beer that the “in crowd” drinks, letting manufacturers put their logos all over our clothes and eating kale and avocado toast even though we don’t like the taste that much.
Even before we reach puberty we’re no longer advertising virgins. The harshest critics might think of the most crass forms of advertising as rape. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt our innocence has been taken advantage of well before we suspected it.
Master advertisers cajole, tease, trick, make us feel left out, get us excited and mark us as targets. Like infatuated teenyboppers, we let ourselves be influenced and manipulated in dozens of ways that remain invisible to us.
It has been found that TV sports fans will expend the equivalent of 80 days of their lives watching the commercials between baseball innings, football replays and other sports timeouts.
And, for all the rest of us, every minute or hour we are now spending online with our smart phones or favorite social media is time we are scrolling through one ad after another.
U.S. citizens spend 11 hours a day engaged with some form of ad-based media. Teens and young adults, age 14-25, spend 43 percent of their time online, according to the latest Nielson Total Audience Report (https://www.nielsen.com/insights.)
Another recent media survey reported the average American encounters as many as 3,000 to 4,000 advertisements every single day. (To me, that total is too astounding to believe.) This total includes billboards, apparel and other “branding” logos, package labels, TV and radio time, and, of course, all those minutes of enrapture and engagement on the Internet.
The history of advertising
Advertisements are as old as prehistoric cave paintings. Egyptian pharaohs made plentiful use of commercial symbols and sales pitches on their papyrus scrolls. Long before Guttenberg’s moveable type printing press, sign painters hung commercial symbols above doors and on tavern, apothecary and dry goods buildings.
Famously, explorer Christopher Columbus was enticed by a “want ad” from Spanish Queen Isabel to set sail and discover the “new World.” Benjamin Franklin was known as a major purveyor of public advertisements in his Poor Richard’s Almanac. And the original job of a “town crier” was to shout out the shopping specials of the day — centuries before the K-Mart blue light special beacon.
There are several definitions for advertising. Most basically it is the practice of drawing attention to a product or service. Its end-all purpose is to make a sale. Usually the currency of advertising is money, but some forms of advertising merely seek attention, loyalty or influence. Political advertising is all about winning votes and campaign donations. Churches advertise to increase their flock and lots of online advertisers are happy just to increase “traffic” and “clicks.”
In the best experiences with advertising, the advertiser is offering a solution to a problem, such as a plumber listed in the Yellow Pages who can fix a leak. Timing is everything in advertising. Most people don’t wake up and find a leak in their plumbing. But for the one or few that do, a plumber’s offer is a change of life moment.
You could starve without ads
I enjoyed a long career as a news journalist for newspapers. My salary was almost totally paid from sold advertising. I always said if I were the one who had to sell the advertising, instead of reporting the news, I would have starved.
My attitude changed much later in my newspaper career when I owned my own newspapers. My disdain for paid advertising turned to a new source of “true believer.” (That’s when I learned there’s no such thing as a ‘free’ press. Somebody has to pay.)
Prior to that awakening I viewed the ads on the printed page as wasted space where more news or photos should have been printed. At my first newspaper job, the news department was on a separate floor from the advertising department. News reporters were never allowed on the advertising floor.
In broader life, most of us treat advertising the same way. Its an annoyance or, at best, a necessary evil. That is unless you are an advertising sales person or a business owner seeking more customers, increased sales and stronger profits. Then advertising is like mother’s milk.
Advertising works
The secret to advertising is to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. It really is that simple. This holds true for the oldest forms of cave painting advertising to today’s digital online pop-ups now being created and curated by artificial intelligence.
Advertising expenditures and activities total 2.4 percent of America’s Gross National Product. Total advertising revenues and market services last year totaled $680 billion, including $150 billion at Google alone. TV advertising totaled $158 billion; radio spots sold for $35 billion; and, newspaper and magazine ad space sales totaled $24 billion. (Not too long ago (2007) print advertising reached $113 billion. And, therein lies another story about advertising and the demise of newspapers.)
Global advertising revenues are expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2026. That’s an easy target in a world where a 60-second Super Bowl ad sells for $7 million.
The dominant growth is all happening online, in the palm of our hands and emblazoned in our collective cyber-consciences. Sixty-nine percent of all advertising is now sold for mobile devices.
Compared to all the subliminal streams of smartphone and computer based cookies, pixels, popups, banners, algorithms, programmatic targeting and “automated” feeds, the previous world of print and television advertising now seems quaint and full of beloved nostalgia. Just like it was always meant to be, right?
The Golden Age of Advertising
The first ad on television was broadcast on July 1, 1941 between innings of a major league baseball game. The ad was for Bulova watches. The earliest TV ads were often basic announcements from a show’s host at the beginning, middle or end of a program. Nowadays, cable TV viewers must cope with constant scrolling ads across the bottom of the screen or ill-timed animated “popups.”
The decades of great newspapers, like the ones owned by Hearst, Pulitzer, Scripps and others, along with the advent of broadcast television were considered the “Golden Age” of advertising. These were also the times when new lifestyles — a modern life focused on the consumer — were invented.
In case you still want to deny the power of advertising, guess why most American households began eating cold breakfast cereal from boxes or added orange juice to their tables.
Quite often advertisers would create a need to fill where previously there was none. The pioneer “Mad Men” from the middle of the 20th century would create slick, smart or suggestive ad campaigns, following a formula that became known as the “Big Idea.”
The Big Idea outline followed the acronym AIDA (A = Attention; I = Interest, D = Desire, and, A = Action.) First grab the attention of a reader. Then use words or an image to create a personal interest. Now, engage your subject with an emotional hook or desire. Finally, make an offer with a one-time opportunity, looming deadline or a motivation for the reader to spring to action. Sold!
Sometimes these advertising masters could perfect a Great Idea with a single image or a minimum of words. Got milk?
Some of these Golden Age and Mad Men campaigns promoted new products and habits to American homemakers and households. These included the popularity of toothpaste in a tube, chewing gum, pre-rolled cigarettes and feminine hygiene products (Kotex), among others. Automobile advertisements and slogans were as much a part of the American identity as anything else.
In the early part of the 20th century, orange growers had a problem with a surplus of too much fruit. The industry hired ad pitchman Albert Lasker to come up with an answer. Lasker, considered one of the “fathers of modern advertising,” created a national ad campaign for television and newspapers. His “Drink an Orange” ad campaign increased orange consumption by 400 percent in just a few short years. Lasker (1880 – 1952) also pioneered modern political advertising during his work on the 1920 campaign for Warren G. Harding.
Lasker and others including David Ogilvy, J. Walter Thompson and Vance Packard refined the art of advertising into a science with their studies and behavioral tests.
“Man has been called the reasoning animal but he could with greater truthfulness be called the creature of suggestion,” said Walter D. Scott another grandfather of the Mad Men era. “He is reasonable, but he is, to a greater extent, suggestible.”
Packard wrote a milestone book in 1957, “The Hidden Persuaders” that influenced the immediate future of television and the advent of “hot media.”. Packard identified eight “compelling needs” all successful advertisers should address. These were: “emotional security, reassurance of worth, ego gratification, creative outlets, love objects, sense of power, roots, and immortality.” (Immortality?)
The history of advertising is about how the ad men and persuaders have always seemed to stay a step ahead of their audience. P.T. Barnum (1810-1891) said, “there’s a sucker born every minute” when he was talking about hucksters and con men and their gullible audiences and “marks.”
To modernize Barnum’s observation for these times of social media surveillance and predictive advertising, we might say, “there’s a billion suckers born every second.” Half of America’s population (176 million) has a TikTok account and trades clicks and eyeballs a dozen or more times a day.
We’ve come a long way from the days when we first called TV the “boob tube.” That was when there were three network channels to watch and most people only watched one to three hours a day. Now, YouTube has replaced the boob tube and it is followed by 68 percent of us. Some people leave their YouTube feed turned on all day long, anticipating what the Google-owned streaming service will dish up next — just for them they think.
Look what has happened to us. Like fish swimming their entire lives in water, we are clueless about our own ocean of advertising that we float and surf through until we die.
— Rollie Atkinson
4-20-2024
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Good one. I have forwarded this to others in my age group
Dave Anderson
Great article. Some say the advertisements are the only truth in a newspaper.