Advertising

Avoidance Strategies Force New TV Advert Plan

Avoidance strategies is a term I have come across recently that, well, I should of been aware of before now. Its the human reaction to excessive marketing messages, a subconscious filter to weed out the messages that we have no interest in, from online ‘banner blindness’ – to zapping the TV remote control during the ad breaks. It’s present in every media, every marketing message and constructed by the very people Marketing is trying to reach – the consumer.

The problem is, and I have mentioned this before, once something successful has been discovered its imitated. Last year Honda and 11850 produced ‘live’ adverts. One elaborate and engaging, the other a pre-scripted advert that, had it not been live, would constitute one of the worst tv adverts since the Radion ‘Tramore’ ad of the late 1980′s or early 1990′s (its so bad Youtube don’t even have it).

So the pressure is on, to continuously create something new and unique, the ‘big idea’ i guess you could call it. It may sound hard, but it’s happening and there’s examples on this blog already (by Cadburys, Absolut, Wispa, Groove Armada). My research in academia pointed out another obvious truth, the response by big media to these avoidance strategies has been slightly illogical – to increase the number of adverts, increase the length of the ad break and decrease the length of the ads. Thus, more ads and increasing avoidance by the consumer.

So it was good to see Fox in the US pilot a new strategy called ‘Remote Free TV‘ and unfortunate to see it not working out as planned. In essence its less adverts, charged at a premium to the advertisers, giving the viewer less reason to switch. Seemingly its not as successful as they had hoped, but according to the report, they are not giving up. The battle between (TV) avoidance strategies and the consumer is being fought over the remote control . It’s the most interesting move in an industry that is facing difficulties similar to those of the music industry of circa five years ago. Only some of the players seem to be getting creative about how to tackle the problem, unlike the beleagured ITV.

While the Fox move was not as successful as was hoped, it would be interesting to gauge how successful it has been in relation to adverts, how creative those adverts have been in trying to engage the consumer and if a correlation between the two exists. I guess the temptation to zap will always be there when faced with an advert that is essentially irrelevant to the consumer.

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© 2009 LAB: Luke Abbotts Blog.