Old Style Thinking

This article on an entrepreneur's idea of using the lines between parking spots as a place for advertising is interesting.

It'll probably work and make some money, but it's such a classic example of old-style marketing thinking.

Consumers have been trained to ignore advertising because they are bombarded with it constantly. In response, marketers make it more omnipresent and intrusive. Consumers will then learn to ignore more of it until another marketer comes up with a new place to put it.

In the process, we (as a profession) are helping to degrade our shared environment. In this case, I think there's an issue of functionality - depending on how this is implemented, parking lots could go from expanses of concrete with clearly marked spots for cars into a riot of color, words, and images that doesn't work as well as a parking lot.

We're responding to consumer's distaste for our messages by ratcheting the messages up another notch. For a brief moment it seemed that we, as a group, were going to get smarter and started making advertising more targeted and useful for consumers. In other words, instead of turning up the volume, create advertising that was truly useful to people.

That moment has passed for most of the marketing profession, and these kinds of ideas are the result. It'll probably work for a time, until everyone tunes it out. Sad.