All day long we are bombarded by tv and radio commercials. As marketers, its time we stop wasting time and money on these unmeasurable, unproductive mediums.
I know that some of you are thinking that so many large and “successful” companies run plenty of television commercials. And if they are doing it then it must be the right thing to do. Didn’t your momma tell you don’t do something just because everybody else is doing it.
Most of the big companies don’t get it. They continue to use traditional marketing instead of adopting new strategies. For instance, there is a potato chip company running a television commercial right now with a little man visiting a psychologist. His wife keeps telling him to try the new smaller bags. He feels she is poking fun at his size. I have seen that commercial at least nine or ten times and I still cannot remember the brand. How much more powerful would it be if the next time I went to the store they gave me a free sample of the new bag and a coupon to buy a case or better yet, they delivered them to my work place and gave everyone a free bag and a coupon. It probable would cost less than the commercial in terms of cost per thousand reached. But they don’t know that because they can’t measure the true cost per thousand reached with a tv commercial.
Many people are tired of commercials and basically tune them out. I heard Seth Godin give a statistic that 83% of all Tivo users skip commercials. That ought to tell you something.
In my opinion, radio commercials are worse than tv commercials. Almost every time commercials play on the radio, I change the station. There was an air conditioning commercial on the radio where this guy said “too dirty” in a weird kind of way. It was really aggrevating. But they kept playing it over and over and over. To make matters worses, they made another commercial and the guy said “too dirty” the same way. The first commercial sounded like he natural said the phrase that way. You could tell it was forced in the second commercial. Everytime that commercial comes on there is no doubt I am changing the station. If I do need an air conditioning company to do some work for me, it won’t be that company.
Spend your marketing dollars creating better products, building relationships with your customers, running promotions that give you more permission, and advertising that doesn’t interrupt, but is statigically placed where the customer is looking for it, like google.com’s adwords program.