Think about your favorite TV show. Now, see if you can remember what the first commercial was for! You might remember shiny cars but do you remember the brand? Or maybe it was a handsome person brushing their teeth - with what brand of toothpaste? We all are bombarded with advertising and marketing messages totaling 5,000 a day by some estimates. That is an average of one ad impression every 11 seconds. From TV and radio to the internet ads you click off your monitor, smartphone and tablet, we are swimming in a sea of ads.
Richard Pritchard, chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in a speech he gave in September 2017 stated that the average digital (online) ad viewing time is 1.7 seconds with only 20% of ads being viewed for more than 2 seconds. He sights this as a reason that a $200 billion collective budget for digital ads and $600 billion in overall marketing spending is only returning low, single-digit sales growth. He is adamant that online ads “Get verification by accredited media rating council or lose the P&G budget”.
Pritchard is not a cheerleader for digital advertising and is demanding results, not just clicks! He is not alone. Many other consumer brands are continuously evaluating the effectiveness of their advertising. If your brand is Ivory Soap, Pampers or Folgers, your ads need to be every place they are effective.
For many of us in the promotional marketing industry, we work with clients that do not measure their growth by market share. When we are at our best we are targeting message delivery - not broadcasting. And our clients get hundreds or even thousands of ad impressions without having to pay for them every time!
The most important fact about delivering advertising and marketing messages using promotional items is the physical nature of the item. All other advertising is brief (1.7 seconds!) and fleeting. You may not remember everything imprinted on an auto safety kit but you do know there is an emergency phone number when you need it, not to mention the flashlight!
Our secret is that promotional marketing doesn’t have to be remembered the same as other advertising. Even the best and brightest among us can only process pieces of the ads we are presented. It takes many repetitions to actually register. Specialty advertising not only delivers the repetition, but provides a physical object with the information that is normally easily accessed, if it is not already sitting on the desktop.
Every time a person takes a sip from their promotional coffee mug they get another 1.7 seconds! When they glance at the calendar for the date, stick a Post-it (R) note to a memo or grab their keys to go to lunch - a promotional message is adding another 1.7 seconds of ad impression. Even assuming that only 1.7 seconds is all a promotional item will get each time it is seen- that is 51 minutes of advertising from a single calendar!
Sure, you all know that promotional products are unique, effective, economical, accepted by consumers and fun - but many fail to convey this to our clients. Our focus on promotional products interferes with the importance of the work and has us discussing the cost per item rather the value of the promotion.
The dilemma faced by P&G’s Pritchard is that 1.7 seconds of ad impression is not enough for a message to be remembered long enough to effect sales. The delay between seeing an ad on TV, your tablet or the billboard you just drove past and the next time you are shopping is too long and the ad impression too short. Prichard feels that is endemic, especially in digital mobile advertising.
The time between an ad impression from a promotional product and a person initiating an action is very often a matter of seconds! The lights go out, you grab a flashlight that has the electrician’s phone number imprinted on it and you make the call! You don’t need to remember the electricians name, his phone number or 24 hour emergency contact information - you just need to remember the flashlight!
When I was challenged by a woman in a training session I was conducting and had just presented the situation mentioned above, she contended that all she needs is her smartphone. She said all she needs to do is ask “find me an electrician”. She didn’t realize that she was helping me move to another very important point! An advertiser (the electrician in this example) can keep a customer from seeing competitive ads if their ad and contact number is immediately available. Letting a customer do a new search for a service provider always runs the risk of losing a repeat customer or a great prospect.
I’m pretty sure most promotional items wouldn’t qualify as “elegant” but they certainly are remembered.
Gregg Emmer is chief marketing officer and vice president at Kaeser & Blair, Inc. He has more than 40 years experience in marketing and the promotional products industry. His outside consultancy provides marketing, public relations and business planning consulting to a wide range of other businesses and has been a useful knowledge base for K&B Dealers. Contact Gregg at gemmer@kaeser-blair.com.