Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 14, 1990 TAG: 9005120136
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAULA SPAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
Advertisers no longer trust you to keep your twitchy fingers off the remote control or settle back to spend an hour with a favorite magazine. They're afraid you're insufficiently engrossed in such traditional media. They're going to hound you, pop up with commercials where you don't expect them, track you while you commute and shop and catch a movie and schuss down a mountain.
They're everywhere.
The phrase that recurs, among the entrepreneurs unleashing these new ad media, is "captive audience." If you're grabbed at the right time and place, "there's no zipping, no zapping, no ability to change screens," says Al Babinicz, president of Metro Vision Media Network. "People are almost forced to pay attention."
Three-year-old Metro Vision, by way of example, is installing dozens of large video monitors in subway stations in Chicago and Philadelphia, bus shelters in Rochester, the airport in Syracuse.
The lure for commuters, already confronted with numerous but static subway and bus ads, is that Metro Vision provides frequently updated transit information - delays, reroutings, cancellations - along with news headlines, weather reports, stock prices and sports scores. Besides, there's not much competition for one's attention on a train platform.
The catch is that 40 percent of what appears on the high-resolution monitors is commercials. A national advertiser - NBC, Miller Beer and the Wall Street Journal are among those that have signed on - pays $75,000 a month to have its 15-second spots shown every 10 minutes on 300 screens. Metro Vision gives the local transit agency a sliver, typically 5 percent, of the revenue.
This is what the trade calls "out of home" advertising, a proliferating category.
A new company called MallVision, for instance, wants to capitalize on its finding that more than 85 percent of the population, presumably with consumption in its collective heart, visits a shopping mall at least monthly. "Any time you get numbers like that," says Ned A'Bell, MallVision president, "[advertisers] get excited." He expects 40 to 50 malls this year to accept unspecified financial inducements to place multi-screen "video walls" and/or 50 to 60 free-standing monitors along their glossy corridors. Each screen will flash loops of "programming" (i.e., beauty tips, fashion updates, fitness shows) and, naturally, commercials.
POP Radio Corp. - the abbreviation suggests the lulling soft rock it plays, but actually stands for "point of purchase" - has staked out supermarkets, pharmacies, home centers and mass merchandisers, 18,000 of them. Its format apes a radio station's: You hear a smooth-voiced deejay, a little Ronnie Milsap, a little the Schmaltz Strings Play Lynyrd Skynyrd, a few consumer features and a lot of ads for "sponsors" like Alka-Seltzer, Sara Lee and Wisk, as well as for the store itself.
Not even recreational time is immune. Close to half the ski resorts in the country have signed on with Ski View, which puts 4-by-2-foot ads for the likes of Chevrolet, Kodak and Lipton Tea on the support towers of ski lifts. Skiers have a good 30 seconds to gaze at each billboard; the advertisers pay $100,000 to $350,000 a season. Many of them also sponsor promotions - giveaways, events, sweepstakes - until, as Ski View's project manager Lisa Cooperstein brightly puts it, "that whole day in the mountains is just plastered with signage and samples and headbands and contests."
Why this relentless pursuit? It reflects the way the splintering of once-mass media has made reaching a national audience more difficult. "You used to be able to go into one of the three TV networks and move product in a short time," says Bernie Newman, vice president and director of media resources for DDB Needham.
Now, a car maker that wants you to know about its sporty new Fabuloso Coupe faces a vastly multiplied media world. With double the number of radio and TV stations of 20 years ago, with only 66 percent of television households tuned to the three networks (it was 91 percent in 1978), with a growing number of cable networks and two-thirds of U.S. homes equipped with VCRs, with scores of new magazines launched every year, advertisers either have to spend a fortune (and don't seem pleased at that prospect) or find new ways of commanding consumers' attention.
"There probably are 100 or more new specialized media," Newman says. "You see more of a willingness on the part of advertisers to experiment. And there are entrepreneurs out there who recognize these changes and want to exploit them."
Like former adman Eric Medney, who invented a board game called "It's Only Money." His ESM Marketing Group sold more than 200,000 of the games, at $20 to $30 retail, in part because a sweepstakes entry form was enclosed in each box. But Medney also found 25 national advertisers (Courvoisier, HBO, Revlon) willing to buy spaces on the game board at $30,000 per. "It allows advertising to get into the relaxed environment of the home," says ESM spokesman Steve Goldberg. "This game is in front of someone for an hour or two at a time."
Not all such notions will catch on, of course. "There's constant churn in the area, new ideas popping up and old ones fading out," says Pete Riordan, vice president and out-of-home media manager at BBDO. "Most of these new ventures will bomb." The practice of attaching commercials to rental videos, for instance, has not really taken off. And who knows how many takers there will be for the improved blimp technology (soon, instead of videotex messages running across its belly, a blimp may be lighted from within to become a giant logo, a glowing Pepsi sign drifting across the nocturnal sky) under development on the West Coast?
Nevertheless, "there are more formats now than yesterday, and there'll probably be more tomorrow," Riordan predicts.
And there has been rather little measurable resistance to the onslaught. The most significant scuffle has involved movie theaters, where ads shown before films have become the second biggest profit maker (next to popcorn, far ahead of ticket sales) for theater owners. Screenvision Cinema Network, the largest purveyor of theater advertising, places spots for Toyota, Sprite and the U.S. Marines on more than 6,000 of the 17,000 first-run movie screens in the country. It's a pricey ad buy, at $650,000 for a 28-day nationwide run, but Screenvision claims a demographically desirable audience unarmed with zappers.
A few weeks ago, however, the Disney people upset this cozy arrangement by announcing that the studio would prohibit paid screen advertising at theaters bidding to show its movies. Warner Bros. followed suit, the policy to take effect with the May 18 opening of "Gremlins 2: The New Batch." Both studios contended that commercials detracted from the moviegoing experience and were unpopular with ticket-buyers.
Screenvision argues that its research, conducted by Certified Marketing Services Inc., shows very little negative audience reaction, only about 4 percent, down from 6 to 8 percent a decade ago. (Certified doesn't poll audiences; a "negative" reaction means that one of its monitors, visiting a movie theater on a weekend, heard someone complain or boo. The lesson here, if you don't appreciate screen commercials, is not to suffer in silence.)
Disney, however, citing a national survey it commissioned from the National Research Group, retorted that 90 percent of the nearly 19,000 moviegoers polled on March 31 said they did not want commercials shown in theaters. Whether other studios will join the intensifying revolt is unclear.
Meanwhile, a Federal Trade Commission spokesperson declined to confirm or deny published reports of an FTC investigation of whether the Disney and Warner bans may constitute restraint of trade.
Another mini-flap arose when Whittle Communications (headed by the man of whom Vanity Fair recently asked, "Is Chris Whittle the Devil?") announced that ads were about to invade the previously pristine pages of hardcover books. Whittle's "Larger Agenda" series of nonfiction books, commissioned from reasonably well-known authors, each contain about 75 pages of text and 18 pages of Federal Express ads. The company, which signed a two-year contract with Whittle in order to bathe in this quasi-literary glow, also ships the books to its nonpaying audience: 150,000 "opinion leaders," including business execs, legislators, media types and assorted policy-making hangers-on.
A certain disgruntlement surfaced on op-ed pages and in the publishing industry when this marketing venture was first announced. "There were people who were sort of hostile, on a knee-jerk level," says Tony Kiser, who edits the series. But many publications (including The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post's Book World) reviewed the first volume - "The Trouble With Money," by Rolling Stone national editor William Greider - as they would have more traditional economic treatises. And when Kiser approached 35 established writers, only two turned him down because of discomfort at coexisting with ads. At a "representative" $60,000 fee for a 25,000-word manuscript - a standard book manuscript is at least twice that long - Whittle was offering a very sweet deal.
So far, Whittle has not made much of an effort to sell the "Larger Agenda" books to the general public, shipping just a few thousand copies sans ads to bookstores, since the Fed-Ex contract more than assures its profits. But, never one to overlook a potential moneymaker (this is the company beaming Channel One news programming for kids, complete with commercials, into public schools), the company is rethinking this nonchalant practice.
Won't overwhelmed consumers grow inured to the blitz, so accustomed to seeing advertising everywhere that, eventually, they stop paying attention to any of it? Madison Avenue sorts already talk about "clutter" in television; now the clutter seems to be seeping into the general environment. Starting this month, Screenvision is supplementing its movie-theater ads for Volkswagen with "promotional materials" (i.e., brochures and contest entry forms), to be pressed directly into the hands of its captive audience.
But ad people, not surprisingly, insist that consumers get tired only of bad advertising. BBDO has done "commercial wear-out studies" and found that "if you have a terrific commercial, people never forget it," Riordan reports. Even if you're annoyed by three minutes of soda pop and raisin commercials when you've just paid seven bucks for a movie, "I don't know that a negative response to the commercial actually animates any animus against the product," he says. "You may remember the commercial and forget where you saw it." When it comes to new avenues of advertising, "I don't see any drop-off."
Prepare yourselves, therefore, for the baseball season. You already see ads on the video scoreboard and around the perimeters of the field. This year, thanks to a technological breakthrough from the Chicago-based Viskase Corp., the world's largest manufacturer of cellulose casings, you'll find advertising on the hot dogs.
That's right-using a "food colorant" that transfers onto the frank during cooking, Viskase can now stencil commercial messages on behalf of anyone who orders a minimum of 100,000 dogs. A graphic arts department is standing by. Only one color so far ("we call it `toast'; it's, well, it's brown," says the manager of technical services), but the Viskase people are working on that.
Among the expected early customers are baseball franchises themselves, radio stations ordering edible call letters for summer concerts, a governor running for reelection - Viskase won't say which or where - who's considering a Vote for So-and-So dog. There could be designer dogs with little polo players. Dogs plugging the antacids they'll necessitate. Anti-drug dogs urging "Just Say No."
But no insults or cuss words, says Viskase. Some things are sacred.
by CNB