Catchy, right? The creative team took a week to come up with it. Media planners took another four days to put together the buy. Account management worked hard to ensure mutual satisfaction and a good margin.
And it took you one second to read it.
Clear Channel, which owns more than 1,200 stations and is the largest radio company in the US, thinks super-short ads are such a great idea that they're rolling them out across their network.
Clear Channel has begun selling five-second, two-second and even one-second spots in the hope that cost-conscious marketers will find them attractive, according to The Wall Street Journal. Clear Channel is hoping to benefit from increased ad sales in the face of heightened competition for ad dollars from a variety of new and old media. But how much can an advertiser communicate in a five-second "adlet" or a two- or one-second "blink," as these super-short ads are called?
Is this the extreme result of continuous partial attention? Seems like it to me.
Is this another sign of Lord Saatchi's prediction of the strange death of modern advertising? No, I don't think so. I still think that it isn't just about simplicity and speed. It is about value, choice and creativity. These super-short ads will suck, and they will annoy people.
Joe Turow, who I did some research for whilst I was at Penn's Annenberg School, is quoted in the K@W piece and compares super-short ads to product placement:
The whole idea of whizzing past people is part of what product placement is about ... and these short ads are not all that different -- it's a fleeting mention of a product that's designed to reinforce a kind of memory retrieval system.
Whilst I agree that super-short ads may reinforce a message, I think they lack the context of good product placement. Done right, placement associates the product with a specific environment. An Apple laptop in the living room. A can of Coke at the movies. A Chanel dress on the red carpet. Just shouting the brand names isn't enough.
Need proof that there is still room for creative long-format attention-grabbing advertising that needs an entire whopping minute to take place? Ladies and gentlemen, witness Jonathan Glazer's latest work for Sony:
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