The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

The Ad Biz, Yesterday and Today

by

Ken Auletta covers the state of advertising in a New Yorker piece called The New Pitch: Do ads still work?.

Some tidbits:

  • “When we introduced Scope, in the mid-sixties, we were able with television advertising in the first four weeks of the ad campaign to reach more than ninety per cent of U.S. television households ten times.” — Roy Bostock, the former chairman and C.E.O. of the MacManus Group.

  • “I believe today’s marketing model is broken. We’re applying antiquated thinking and work systems to a new world of possibilities.” — Jim Stengel, the global-marketing officer for Procter & Gamble, speaking at last year’s meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

    About Apple’s iPod launch:

    According to the advertising-tracking firm of TNS Media Intelligence, Apple spent twenty-four and a half million dollars to launch the device, and forty-five and a half million dollars between January and September of 2004. (By contrast, Roy Bostock says that to reach the same number of consumers as Scope did when it was introduced would cost at least two hundred million dollars in the first year.) Apple’s expenditures were relatively modest, and surprisingly traditional: only two hundred and six thousand dollars went for Web ads, and ninety per cent of last year’s total went for television, with the broadcast networks receiving twenty-five million dollars and cable just under eighteen million. Yet the real reason that the iPod has more or less cornered the digital music-player market is far simpler: the product was brilliantly conceived and executed. Word-of-mouth and promotion did the rest.

    Still shocking in a way that the main “alternative” focus of the piece was about product placement, rather than about interactive advertising.

    Also from the mag: selling in 1938.