MattCreamer.com

My least favorite kind of news story is the breathless discovery of some new media channel, i.e. a new place for marketers to dump ads. The New York Times has had two of these stories in just two days. Yesterday, there was a piece about ad-supported Internet telephone, an idea which offends just about every shred of common-sense in my being. Then today, there’s one about ads near runways in airfields. As if, the airline experience wasn’t already rock-bottom, let’s shove a few more few ads in your face.

Here’s my favorite quote: “What an incredible marketing opportunity — all these passengers with nothing else to do, staring down at the ground below,” said Paul Jenkins, managing director of London-based Ad-Air, the start-up that’s the focus of the press rel-, er, article.

I love the notion that activities like reading, talking, watching TV, listening to music, or simply just sitting there and not be marketed to constitutes “passengers with nothing else to do.” That’s a sophisticated understanding of your audience there Paul.

Anyway, the problem with this genre of story is that they don’t ask questions that mattter: What benefits do these channels provide marketers and consumers that weren’t there before? Will they annoy consumers? What’s the ROI? There’s also the never-asked overarching issue of just how does the proliferation of channels–basically, everything is media–does to the overall effectiveness of ads. Consumers are already over-marketed to, so don’t additional places to cram commerical messages just make everything else less effective.  Yeah, it’s time for the c-word. Clutter. Everyone wants to talk in a hackneyed way about breaking through it. Nobody wants to talk about reducing it.

I’ve long thought the ad business needs to think in a high-level, industry-wide way about reigning in its overproduction of messaging. I even wrote a story about it a while ago. What amazed me back then was that though everyone agreed that clutter’s a major issue, I was treated as though I were speaking an arcane Chinese dialect when I asked whether or not advertisers wouldn’t be well-served by turning down the spigot. But, really, something needs to be done. The ad business is basically diluting itself to death.