Intensity of advertising increases in U.S.

Press, 3 February 1986, Page 36

Intensity of advertising increases in U.S.

NZPA-NYT New York Using such traditional vehicles as television screens and billboards and such unlikely new ones as parking meters and ski lift towers, advertisers are bombarding Americans with an ever increasing number of messages.

The trend is most pronounced on television, where more commercials of shorter length are filling the airwaves. The phenomenon encompasses other electronic and print media as well, but extends far beyond them. Companies today are placing their sales pitches on almost anything that stands still, and on some things, like shopping carts in supermarkets, that do not.

At work, advertising experts say, are a number of converging developments.

The growth in the number of products and services in the marketplace has led to intensified competition for consumer attention, meaning there are more sales messages being disseminated.

As the demand for advertising time and spac,e has increased, so has the cost, forcing advertisers to look for cheaper ways of getting their points across, such as shorter television commercials.

As the traditional media have become saturated with advertisements, companies have started placing sales pitches in innovative, attention-grabbing places. The result has been more messages aimed at consumers from more locations. “There is nowhere in American culture where you can escape the advertising noise,” said Mr Michael Schudson, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, and author of “Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion.” Advertising volume has

grown steadily for the last century as sales, distribution and marketing techniques have evolved, new media emerged and the economy expanded. But lately, the number of advertisements has grown to worrisome proportions, according to advertising executives.

This has led to concerns that a clutter of competing messages is making it harder and harder for advertisers to get their sales pitches across.

Advertisers are also worried about signs that consumers are choosing to tune advertising out more often, by "zapping” television commercials with remote control devices, or turning to media such as video cassette recorders and pay television where advertising is limited or non-existent.

Or perhaps by becoming choosier about which messages they pay attention to.

A recent study by the Newspaper Advertising Bureau concluded that the number of messages transmitted by television, radio,' magazines and newspapers had doubled from 1967 to 1982, and would double again by 1997.

The bureau study did not determine the specific number of messages. However, on network television alone, the number of spots broadcast in an average week rose to 5131 in 1985 from 3487 in 1975 and 1839 in 1965, according to Mr Harold Spielman, chief executive of McCollum-Spielman and Company, an advertising research firm based in Great Neck, New York. Much of the increase on television does not result from more time set aside for commercials. That has increased somewhat, though not nearly as much as some critics suggested it would after the Federal Communications Commission deregulated commercial time in 1984.

Instead, the rise in the number of messages comes more from a gradual shrinkage in the length of the commercials themselves, which were typically 60 seconds long two decades ago, then went to a 30-second standard and are now, increasingly, only 15 seconds long.

Thus, more commercials are being shown in the same amount of time, a fact that has not escaped most viewers. “It has really got out of hand,” said Mr Dave Vadehra, president of Video Storyboard Tests, a New York company that tracks the popularity and effectiveness of television commercials.

His company has found that the number of people who say they pay absolutely no attention to commercials increased to 20 per cent in 1984 from 13 per cent in 1983.

That trend was expected to continue when figures become available for 1985, Mr Vadehra said.

While the big complaint about commercials used to be that they insulted the viewers’ intelligence, the complaint now was that there were just too many of them, he said.

The reaction is much the same toward non-tele-vision advertising, experts say. “A greatly increased number of advertisements will put the public on its guard and raise the general level of resistance to messages that are unwanted,” said Mr Leo Bogart, executive vicepresident of the N.A.B. and a prominent advertising researcher, in a recent article published by the Conference Board, a business research group. “But few messages fall only on unreceptive ears. There are always consumers in a stage of potential interest, for whom any given advertisement represents useful information,” he

Many advertising experts note, in fact, that Americans appear remarkably tolerant of the advertising surrounding them, even as its quantity increases.

“Advertising is in many ways the articulation of values we already possess, and it is in many ways our dominant art form,” Mr Schudson said. “It doesn't for the most part surprise us or shock us. We take it for granted, even in megadoses.”

One effect of the record quantity of advertising — more than SUS9S billion ($183.35 billion) was spent on it in 1985, an 8.3 per cent increase from 1984, according to Mr' Robert Coen, a senior vice-presi-dent at the McCann-Erick-son advertising agency — has been to help support more media outlets.

Especially notable has been the increase in independent television stations, the advent of cable television and the rise of special interest publications, all of which offer advertisers new ways to reach their audiences.

Some much different advertising vehicles have appeared as well in recent years. In Pittsburgh, CheckOut Line Television, Inc., installed televisions in about 50 supermarkets.

The screens offer shoppers in the aisles and on checkout lines “howto” information and other programming, as well as advertising from such companies as H. J. Heinz, Kraft, and Pillsbury. Some customers leaving their food stores could find advertising awaiting them on parking meters. There is also a deluge of advertising on taxis, buses and bus shelters.

Along the highways is a new generation of billboards with attentiongrabbing artwork, shapes and lighting, such as those promoting Nike sneakers and Calvin Klein jeans.