Re: [projectvrm] Multifunctional Advertising

[sylvain willart < >]

Chris,

Here are a few resources and comments

> 1.    It seems to me that when we talk about "advertising" and/or
> "marketing" there are several different things going on at once, with
> differing levels of intrusiveness, annoyance, and usefulness.

yes, of course. From a scholar viewpoint, "advertising" is a part of
"communication", which is a part of "marketing". The intrusiveness /
annoyannce / usefulness deals with two different things:
 - the content of the message
 - the media

> 2.    On the one hand there is purely informational advertising.  I'm going
> to go buy new DVD player later today.  There's a brand I've heard is pretty
> good.  Right now I would affirmatively welcome information about which
> vendors within a 10-20 mile radius have which brands and models in stock, at
> which prices.

This point is about content and media together. You heard from a brand
because the company made some king of "product communication", or
perhaps "corporate communication" (the later talks about the
performances of the company and the brand without mentioning a
specific prodcut, like "Bose, dedicated to innovation")

If you would like to have vendors information, this looks like more
direct-marketing: the message is not dedicated to an 'audience', but
rather a specific person, you. And the message is thus tailored to
your situation (geographic situation in taht case, but could be
specific to your purchase history)

> 3.    On the other hand, there is stuff designed to stimulate desire for
> some product.  Some of it is blatant and some of it is subtle.  But on the
> whole I don't want my desires to be stimulated by some third party seeking
> my money as a result.  That may be the world's oldest economic activity, but
> it still leaves you feeling, you know, kinda cheapened.

stimulate desire for some products is the very one goal of marketing.
Companies are more or less successfull in that matter, and, yes, some
are more subtle than others...
I don't think you can really escape advertising and marketing. But if
it lets you feel cheapened, this means you are at least aware of it,
and among the smarter. One of the things I find most unfair is that
less rich and less educated people are the most sensitive to
advertising.

>     a.    But of course it's not quite that simple.  In matters of fashion,
> for example, there is a very fine line between "needing information" --
> which in that case, is needing information about what is fashionable and
> cool -- versus having one's desires stimulated.  (I'm thinking of something
> like Vogue, which someone else mentioned recently, where the ads
> simultaneously reveal and shape perceptions of what's cool, and what,
> therefore, people will actually want to buy).

Fashion is an all different matter. It mixes sociology of groups
(there is a very good writer on this topic, but it is in french, he
wrote a book called "sociologie des tendances" - "sociology of
trends/fashions"), and a variant of Veblen effect (economic
explanation of the demand for luxury products)

> 4.    Then there's the whole issue of intrusiveness of presentation.  In
> every medium there is something that, to me, marks the line of "OK" versus,
> "This is just too f**king much!  Stop!"  In magazines, e.g., its the use of
> multiple "blow-out" cards.  I mean, really?  You're going to make me pick up
> the damn card after it falls on the ground and put it somewhere before I
> throw it away?  Online, it's pop-ups, pop-unders, and that abomination where
> you get to the site (the NY Times is horrible about this) and there's some
> add along the top that expands to take over half your screen (and distorts
> the location of the text) before it disappears again.

this latter deals with the medium. Historically, media planning is the
first topic in marketing where sholars and practitioners developped a
quantitative modelling approach (back in the 50's media firms hired
engineers to do the maths). for long, the only way to deal with media
planning was the "reach", the "target audience", the "cost for
thousand"...
Those metrics are very well explained in Sissors book:
http://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Media-Planning-Seventh-Roger/dp/0071703128
and if you feel like digging into the maths:
Advanced Media Planning , Rossiter & Danaher, Springer ed

More recently (80's), and with the development of "direct-marketing"
(sending a message to one specific person with specific medium like
mail, phone, and then e-mail, websites), some scholars began to raise
the issue of intrusiveness. A good book on that topic could be
"Permission Marketing" (Godin, 2000), and "Why CRM doesn't work"
(Newell, 2003).

Last year, a paper appeared in "Journal of Marketing" (the best
reknowned journal among the world of marketing scholars), it is
entitled "Enough Is Enough! The Fine Line in Executing Multichannel
Relational Communication" (Godrey, 2011), and deals with the
surrabondance of messages and repetition through different media.
There are some econometric analysis, but the discussion is easy to
follow. Link to the full paper:
http://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&ved=0CEgQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgvoss.cox.smu.edu%2FRelationalCommunication.pdf&ei=Cc0gUYfiA8-4hAf-1YDgAQ&usg=AFQjCNHSeTSoKt7XTLy1pzt-5hbZLfdeJQ&bvm=bv.42553238,d.ZG4

>  My reaction is akin
> to that I have to a particularly aggressive and smarmy salesperson in a
> clothing or whatever store.  I walk in to look around a bit, and they are
> totally in my face with, "Can I help you with anything?  Can I show you
> what's on sale?"  As if I am incapable of exercising my own agency and
> asking them to tell me about something if I'm interested, or where to find
> it if I don't see it.
>
> 5.    Weirdly, from this perspective, I like reasonably subtle product
> placement (mocked, e.g., in The Truman Show).  I'd rather see that all the
> cool folks in some spy movie use Macs and all the bad guys use Dell, or that
> all the cool guys drive Fords, or whatever, than have someone run up to me
> in some store and pester me about what kind of computer or car I want.

Product placement in movie, even if it is a long-lasting practice, is
very new to the analysis of media planning. It is actually quite hard
to compute the effect of product placement (because of the release on
DVD, then on TV...). There is a team of scholars in Tilburg (NL)
working on that topic from an econometric perspective.


> A bit of a ramble.  Sorry for that.  But my question, again: has anyone done
> any notable (or at least readable) research about these different dimensions
> of the advertising/marketing phenomenon?

A lot of research is being done on those things (I conducted one
myself for companies who start to gain interest on those aspects of
communication/advertising)
Usually, intrusiveness is showed in papers with qualitative
methodologies (interviews, focus group...)...
Many such papers appear in "Journal of Advertising Research" for
example, but also in more general marketing journals (with primary
focus not necessarily on advertising)

>
> Thanks,

I just re-read this message before posting, and I am not sure if my
answer is complete, but the subject is very large, and fast-evolving
right now...

> Chris S.

Sylvain
(PhD in marketing...)