Advertising in the trenches: reaching the overstimulated consumer.

• Author: Skoy, Jenie
• Position: Business Trends

MEET Joe, your typical American consumer. Joe wakes up to Crazy Eddy on the radio, selling everyone's favorite holiday cheese ball. During the TV morning news and the daily commute, the advertising assault continues. Even the billboards get a little presumptuous--telling Joe where to get gas and buy food, and even encouraging him to donate his organs. By the end of the day, Joe has become glassy-eyed to the blare, glare, glitter and pop of traditional advertising.

Armed with this awareness, savvy advertising execs are funneling more of their clients' money into new forms of advertising to catch consumers like Joe off guard.

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"Consumers are hiding from us," says Mark Hurst, president of W Communications. "We've always been intrusive--we interrupt their mail, radio, television." Hurst believes that the cutting edge of marketing must become even sharper because consumers are controlling their modes of communication more than ever--rather than listening to the radio, they are file-sharing on Napster or recording their favorite programs on TiVo. "We are having to reach people one at a time and often in the trenches." Hurst calls this phenomenon "narrow casting" instead of broadcasting: (reaching the one instead of the masses) and reports that W Communications spends up to 30 percent of their clients' money on nontraditional advertising. He sees a similar trend locally and nationally.

Other marketing gurus agree. Alan Sandomir, marketing professor at the University of Utah echoes this idea, "There is too much clutter, too many ads, too many choices and media connections. We are overstimulated; there's no way for a product to have good recognition." He believes that combined marketing efforts have hypnotized consumers. And in order to wake consumers up, advertisers must "slap them out of their hypnoidal state."

Ways advertisers are attempting to "wake" consumers include catching them off-guard with stunts or "befriending" them by sending out marketing messages under the guise of personal e-mails. One Utah company even went on the road from British Columbia to the Grand Canyon with a bus full of motocross hot-shots to help their company carve its niche into the action sports industry.

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