Marketing Insights

Advertising clutter has reached a crisis point in America.

"The average American sees three thousand ads a day."

— Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice

As a result, billions of dollars are being wasted each year on TV and radio spots and print ads that are ignored by overwhelmed consumers...the same consumers you are trying to reach with your marketing dollars.

Fortunately, you have some options for spending your scarce marketing dollars.

One of them is buzzmarketing.

Now you can learn the secrets of buzzmarketing by reading Mark Hughes' tell-all book, Buzzmarketing: Getting People to Talk About Your Stuff.

Mark Hughes is the CEO of Buzzmarketing and the keynote speaker at next week's ACTON Marketing symposium in Charleston, South Carolina.

In his book, Hughes shares his Six Secrets that are the critical building blocks to creating killer buzz.

The Six Secrets are:

BUZZ BASICS

The First Secret – Push the Six Buttons of Buzz

The Second Secret – Capture Media

The Third Secret – Advertise for Attention

BUZZ LEADERSHIP

The Fourth Secret – Climb Buzz Everest

The Fifth Secret – Discover Creativity

The Sixth Secret – Police Your Product

This month we present Hughes' insights on the cluttered media market from Chapter Ten, "The Third Secret – Advertise for Attention."

Hughes writes, "Once upon a time, there were three little networks.

"TV clickers didn't exist, and door-to-door salesmen were actually given the courtesy of the time of day. From a marketer's perspective, things were great. People paid attention to you, and you had few ads competing for attention.

"The Way It Is

"That was the way it was. Today, as you very well know, TV remote controls are a must. Viewers zap more than 63 percent of TV ads. The average cable watcher can choose from more than a hundred channels. Some 25 percent of all TV time is ad related. Most TV shows get one-tenth the ratings that they did thirty years ago. Marketers are launching new products and extensions of their products left and right (as just one example, over 166,000 book titles will be launched this year). People are sleeping less, working more, and feeling inundated with the more than a thousand ad messages each of us is bombarded with every day.

"Hello, marketers – are you listening? The truth is, your ads aren't having much impact.

"Proof? According to a study by the American Academy of Advertising, when a TV commercial comes on, 92 percent of us change the channel, mute the commercial, ignore the commercial, or divert our attention to something else. Don't forget TiVo, either; 71 percent of people interested in TiVo said the feature they liked the most was the ability to skip the commercials.

"One of the most comprehensive advertising studies of the magazine sections in Sunday newspapers performed in the 1970s showed what you might expect: One's ability to recall advertising relates to the thickness of the magazine. The more advertising in a given medium, the less effective each advertisement.

"More clutter, less impact.

"Bad news for those in the United States, because it's the most cluttered ad market in the world. America spends more on advertising than Mexico's entire gross domestic product (something over $230 billion each year).