By Michael Nutley of

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I recently wrote a column for NMA which looked at the way advertisers are trying to address the diminishing effectiveness of traditional advertising. It�s a phenomenon with which anyone working in the media will be familiar. Advertisers don�t want the familiar formats and treatments; they want something new, something different, in order to stand out from the ever-increasing clutter of advertising messages.

Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore sum the situation up neatly in their recent book, �Communities Dominate Brands�: �We are seeing the combined effects of sensory overload of competing marketing messages with ever smaller accessible audiences. This leads inescapably to the diminishing efficiency of the individual advertisements in a specific medium in any given campaign�.

Advertorial coming in from the cold?

At the same time as this is happening, consumers are rejecting conventional interruptive advertising. They�re using PVRs to skip ads; they�re downloading pop-up blockers; they�re enabling spam filters; they�re signing up to telephone preference services (the �don�t call me� lists), they�re subscribing to ad-free satellite radio.

The response I discussed in my column (NMA 3/11/05) was the greater accommodation of advertising and editorial, whether that�s Web sites providing creative assistance to advertisers, or programme makers accepting product placement in order to generate revenue. There seem to be two arguments advanced to support these moves.

Drawbacks to product placement

The first is that people are sufficiently media-literate to know what�s going on, and that therefore they are not upset by it. The second is that if the advertisers go too far, consumers will start to switch off. The balance will be reestablished, and we�ll go back to business as before.

Both these arguments seem flawed to me. If the first is true, and people do understand about, say, product placement, the halo effect of having your product being used by the programme�s hero evaporates. The second seems to run against the growing feeling that the ideal amount of advertising is none. The world of blogging, for example, is very much anti-advertising. Bloggers expect honesty and transparency from any brands venturing into their world, and are quick to condemn those that break their rules.

That, and the suggestion that product placement and the like were the last throes of the interruptive advertising culture, was as far as I got.

But thinking about it subsequently, it seems rather more complicated. Certainly it�s easy to imagine a two-tiered system developing, rather as in the US radio market, where listeners can have either a free service with ads, or pay for one that is ad-free. That works for consumers, but not necessarily for brands.

Reaching the clued-up consumer

Instead the phrase being bandied about is engagement marketing; creating something so compelling that people value it as more than just an ad. GM O�Connell, founder of US agency Modem Media, talks about �advertising as service�, advertising that is so relevant and so targeted that it is welcomed by the consumer receiving it, rather than being at best tolerated and at worst binned instantly.

But the question that remains unanswered is how is that initial proposition conveyed? How do you get it across to an audience that is so media-savvy that it sees you coming, and so technologically equipped that it can simply shut you out?

Brands take a supporting role...

One suggestion here is to use word-of-mouth, suitably technologically souped-up of course, in the form of company blogs, chat rooms and forums. These are the domain of people who have both declared an interest in the area in which your brand operates, and shown themselves to be keen on talking about it. But as Mark Iremonger, MD of Web design agency Unit9 said in a recent feature in NMA about user communities, the mistake brands make is to think that consumers want to talk to them; they don�t. They want to talk to each other. The best the brand can manage is to facilitate that discussion, and in many cases, those consumers will be more comfortable in a forum enabled by a third-party, say a media-owner.

...as consumers take centre stage

I talked to such a media 0wner about this the other week, and he said in this situation brands have a choice; they can either ignore the chat-rooms, or engage with them, if only to listen in to consumer opinion. The saving grace here for advertisers is that this shift in both attitudes and use of technology will take time; time that gives them the chance to build a bridge between their current relationship with their customers and the new one. The worrying thing is that for some products and audiences, it may already be too late.

Michael Nutley is the editor of New Media Age.