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It's so crowded that no one goes there any more

Monday, 24 May 2004 11:42 AM

In this week's NYT Magazine, Rob Walker notes the inherent contradiction between the public's professed distaste for advertising and its love of certain, sneaky marketing:

So, if we're all so sick of advertising, why are millions of us spending our free moments interacting with an ad and then forwarding it to all of our friends?

The answer has to be more than just some latent cultural desire to dominate the chicken-suited. Another recent online ad -- actually, just the online version of a widely broadcast TV spot for Adidas, in which the magic of special effects enables Muhammad Ali's boxer daughter to hurl punches at her father -- has been streamed more than five million times. And American Express has run television ads starring Jerry Seinfeld and Superman that are essentially teasers for longer online ads with the same characters; the first ''Webisode'' has also attracted millions of viewers. In a postmodern move, Seinfeld actually hit the talk-show circuit to promote his new Web commercials. On ''The Daily Show,'' the host, Jon Stewart, skipped the truth-to-power irreverence that has made him a hero to media-savvy young people and politely quizzed Seinfeld about his new project -- a bunch of ads.

Where's the outrage? It turns out that even Gary Ruskin draws a distinction between the ads we hate and the ads we actively seek out. ''This is not coercive,'' he says; it's basically opt-in entertainment, rather than something you can't avoid or that ''clobbers'' you to get attention. ''That strategy is going to work as people get more and more fed up with advertising,'' he adds. Alex Bogusky, a partner in the ad firm that hatched the chicken stunt, says almost the exact same thing: ''It's not all that different from just regular entertainment.''

(The NYT article is free for a limited time -- check it out before it's moved to the archive.)

Read more about consumers' love/hate relationship with marketing in this previous post.

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