Current Advertising Theory

Current Advertising Theory

With every technological advance, there must also be an advance in the media to find new ways of delivering information on said technology. Advertising agencies have been very successful at this. In the past decade advertising has had to keep up with an audience moving away from normal television and print media. Obstacles such as digital video recorders, such as Tivo, and other forms of digital media allow users to bypass traditional advertisements thus forcing ad agencies to produce clever new ones to fool the population into not realizing they’re watching an advertisement. Though with the realization of the media’s influence American’s can hope to see changes in the advertising industry that allows for more free expression rather than force fed jingles.

Each American is exposed to well over 2,500 advertising messages per day. This bombardment of media has forced us to adapt. We no longer realize that we tune out most advertisements. The ads increasingly encroach upon our public space: our schools, our public transportation, our buildings, and even our beaches (a new technique enables the advertisers to stamp their ads onto the sand at beaches.) These adaptations force the advertising agencies to connect more with the target audience and get further into their minds. In an interview with Douglas Rushkoff he describes one of the current trends of agencies:

On the subway, a young woman was laughing loudly to herself. Even in a mind-your-own-business climate like New York, you see people doing this in public now and then. What was unusual this time was that she decided to engage anyone in earshot in conversation. She told how she was remembering a scene in the film The Royal Tannenbaums and asking if anyone else remembered it. A couple took her up on her charge and said that they liked it too. The woman went on to tell all of us what a wonderful film it was and that if we didn't know what she was talking about, we needed to see the film. Being a New Yorker, you're usually suspicious by nature of such good-natured qualities (how sad) but it was fairly evident after a while what was going on here. She was a buzz-marketer- someone who's paid to stir up interest in a movie or an artist or such. If you think I'm being a smug cynic (the film is a very good one but I knew that before I met her), I actually walked up to her to ask her if this is in fact what she was doing. Though she didn't answer me directly, she gave me a big grin and raised her eyebrows. Question answered.

This new form of getting into the public and simply telling them about a product without revealing the fact that your actually listening to an advertisement is one of the sneakier methods utilized by cutting edge ad agencies. Other forms, as illustrated in the film Merchants of Cool, include people employed by ad agencies spending time with teenagers in the target demographic age group and getting to know what they think is “cool” and why. Ty Montague, in an MIT conference on advertising trends, said there are currently two competing models of communication being applied by advertisers: the monologue approach, a