Oh, Advertising. I Hate You... yet I'm strangely attracted...

I’ve had an unexplainable attachment to M&Ms for most of my life. I don’t remember the attachment initially, but as a child you could push me down on my diaper-covered toddler butt and I'd be fine, but taking away my little bag of M&Ms meant trouble. So I was surprised when Elliot threw down the Reese’s Pieces to coax E.T. out of the bushes. But in hindsight, it’s better to sacrifice your Reese’s Pieces. Save the M&Ms for yourself. Anyway, I gave a lot of thought to this subject. And Reese’s is probably happy about it. Because they paid Spielberg $20,000 to have their product featured in the movie, and their sales jumped 66% overnight. It’s one of the seminole moments in the marketing in movies. Along with Jaws being the first summer blockbuster. Another source of advertising revenue was found. Paid Placement.

As a marketer, I’ve bought magazine ad space. I’ve bought local newspaper ad space. I’ve even arranged for an on-location radio event for a warehouse sale at our headquarters.

But couple those things with my knowledge as a media consumer (ie. I read magazines and watch TV) and I am an expert in my mind.

And advertising is going through some growing pains. To a large degree, advertising dollars are a zero sum game. There are only so many dollars that will be spent on advertising. The dollars get shifted around from format to format. Old forms of advertising die. Types of companies that advertise change.

Take radio. It’s gone from a national advertising medium to a local and regional advertising medium. But it’s still viable for local businesses. TV is giving way to the Internet. The best commercials made for TV never get shown on network TV but become an Internet phenomenon. Ad words and banner placement based on the context of the searches made by browsers is giving way to behavioral advertising over time.

Internet business models have gone from “make money by selling stuff” to “build a killer app that people use and sell advertising to those who want to make money by selling stuff”. That’s a big part of what caused the dot com bubble to burst. There are only so many dollars in the online-ad well. Even still, I am amazed at how many successful companies are still popping up with this model. Though I hear we are on another bubble. And what are the chances that at some point we’ll see Google-Like ads appear somewhere on the screen during your favorite TV shows.

But here’s my product placement vent. When I was reading the Fog, I was amused and engaged when I read that a bottle Ragu was smashed over someone’s head. Because we had a jar of Ragu hanging out in the cupboard. But now, if this were pulled off in a movie, I’d immediately view this as product placement, done for a fee by the movie producers, and call all of my friends to bitch about it.

Sure: TV, movie, music and pc gaming producers and artists need to make money on their product. I get it and support it. If TiVO, disappearing CD sales, slacking box office receipts and online digital media theft are going to eat up their profit, go ahead and make it up on the front end. But remember that if it looks like advertising or smells like advertising, it will look untrustworthy and suspicious. Make your creative people be more creative.