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Ad Report Card: Ads for Ads

By Rob WalkerPosted Monday, Feb. 25, 2002, at 10:48 AM ET

Occasionally people ask me: Do ads even work? My answer is usually something along lines of: sort of, sometimes, although no one knows for sure, and a lot of people think not, but the bottom line is that everyone's too scared to find out what would happen if they stopped advertising altogether. That's not a satisfying response, of course. But somebody else has a different response: Yes! Ads work! That point of view comes from the not exactly unbiased American Advertising Federation, which lately has been running a series of ads touting the benefits of advertising itself. You can see them here.

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The Coke-ish Spot: "A secret formula revealed," reads the white type against a black background, as a cheesily bombastic jingle cranks up in the background. Cut to a bottle rotating toward the camera, its label a very familiar shade of red with equally familiar white, scripty letters flowing across it. But the label doesn't say "Coca Cola." It says "Adver-Tising." The lyrics: "It's the real thing. That's the way it should be." (Here another vocal bursts in with "Adverti-i-i-sing.") "What the world wants to see. Whoa-oh-oh, yeah. It's the real thing." As the music fades, white type reappears across the black background: "Advertising. The way great brands get to be great brands."

The Intel-ish Spot: It starts with a black screen, onto which white type appears against the sound of a clacking keyboard. "What makes one computer more powerful than another?" There is a pause. Then onto the screen bursts what at first glance looks like the well-known "Intel Inside" logo, with its big, blue circular swish, and the memorable sound of the four-note Intel mini-jingle. But inside the circle is the word "advertising" (hyphenated so that, broken in two, it more closely resembles the Intel slogan). This lingers a second, then disappears. And the same closing message as the Coke ad clicks across the screen.

You buying? According to the AAF, this campaign is "unprecedented." In the words of the group's president, it "underscores the fact that brand recognition is possible only through sustained advertising—and it's no different when that brand is advertising itself." (A print-only version of the campaign has been kicking around since October 2000.) But maybe the most telling bit of the AAF's press release notes that the series essentially "cautions Corporate America not to neglect their brand development. In this time of economic challenge, the campaign is right on target in stressing that advertising builds brand equity and profits." This assertion smacks of desperation: We're in the middle of an ad slump that, apparently, is so bad that we must now sit through ads for ads.

The spots, meanwhile, make their case in a way that is less than thoroughly convincing. Yeah, those logos are famous because we've seen them in a million ads. So what? Isn't it possible that, say, Intel built a well-known brand on the strength of, oh, I don't know, innovative technology? (Or perhaps Intel is essentially conceding here, by letting the AAF have its way with the company logo, that its success is a simple triumph of marketing.) And the music in that "Coke" spot—"It's what the world wants to see"? This is so ridiculous and absurd that it sounds like something a bunch of culture-jammer types would put together as a parody. But who knows—there's actually something pleasing about the idea of some "corporate decision maker" who had lately grown skeptical about the payoff of advertising changing his or her mind after seeing one of these ads. Perhaps this person would say, dronelike, "Yes. Advertising works after all. It is an effective way to sway the malleable hoi polloi. Must. Buy. More Ads."

Perhaps just as amusing (or perhaps not) is the fact that the AAF is reportedly asking networks to run these spots for free. In late January the New York Times said that magazines and newspapers have "so far donated $4 million worth of space to run the ads." (Thanks to my colleague William Saletan for pointing that item out to me; he also raises an eyebrow at the $4 million figure—at a time when ad pages are down, "who exactly was clamoring to pay that?") This might seem a little strange, since the greater good of advertising is not exactly a public service or a charitable cause. But of course publications or networks or TV stations, which derive revenue from advertising, have a self-interested reason for "donating" time to these pitches for pitches: Nobody has a greater motivation for believing in the power of advertising than they do.

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Rob Walker writes the Ad Report Card for Slate.

COMMENTS

Note From The Fray Editor:

Pentium: technical success or advertising success? Readers disagreed: see below. Does advertising work? A nice story from Brian here. Is Generation X brand-resistant? Argue it out here.

Reader Comments From The Fray:

They should have been doing this all along. After all, if their product is worth anything, they should be able and interested in boosting their own revenues first and foremost. I wonder if fear was a motivating factor in not doing this earlier. What happens if their ad campaign fails? That would discredit advertising, or at least marketing firms, as a way to generate revenue.

It has the possibility of fundamentally changing the way people live. It would dramatically alter television, print media and the internet, and it could end radio entirely. This would have a massive negative impact on the general knowledge, especially of current events, for the average person, if they don't transfer the money saved on products that are not advertised to products no longer supported by advertising. There's really no reason to believe that people would suddenly start spending more money on news rather than buying many more DVD's and sneakers.

--Zorro

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

If you think about it these types of commercials are unusual only in who is running them. I routinely see newspapers, cable companies, radio stations, etc. touting their respective advertising power and they have been doing so for years. That the AAF is producing these promotions now only means that their members are screaming for them to do something, anything, to justify their collective existence.

--Loran

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

I didn't realize that advertising was in a slump. It hardly seems so if one watches even five minutes of television. Perhaps it has so permeated our culture that it has no room for growth. God, I hope so. It has ruined so much. It's gratifying to see Mr. Walker even noting that possibly advertising is irrelevant to the success of Intel, that maybe they just had a superior product.

--Jon A. Jackson

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

It's pretty much the consensus of the entire business world (and college classrooms now) that Intel's Pentium product was wildly successful solely because of its advertising campaign, which was one of the first successful attempts to lure a mass audience into buying computers by advertising a hardware component instead of the computer itself.

Even if the Pentium is a truly innovative product, almost nobody knows how it works, or why it's more innovative than its competitors. But the consensus among consumers seems to be that the Pentium works much better than all competitors' products, which is not really the case. That's a direct result of Intel's marketing, which is responsible for why the brand is so successful.

If you need further proof, remember the recalls of Pentiums around the time they were first introduced because of a faulty math coprocessor? Nobody else does either.

--Matt

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(2/27)

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