Advertising tactics: Advertising by stealth is on the increase as advertisers seek to break through the media clutter to reach time-pressed, distracted consumers
If you're a movie-goer who was so impressed by Benicio del Toro in the action packed trailer for Lucky Strike that you made a mental note to go see it when it arrives, I hope someone will have pulled you aside and told you the truth: that film doesn't exist.
Last month Mercedes claimed a first for the advertising industry - it made a three-minute trailer for an imaginary movie. Directed by Michael Mann (of Ali fame, or infamy), it was all action driving and hard-man heroics. Nowhere on screen would you have seen the marque's brand name.
The car company isn't the only advertiser who has resorted to advertising by stealth. The New York Times website recently turned down Sony's new $10 million campaign because it involved placing feature articles on the site that were written in the paper's own style with only a small sub-head identifying it as "feature by Sony". The campaign runs on the National Geographic website and the article features a retired NASA engineer and his wife as they cross the country in a camper van. In other words, it's a fairly typical National Geographic story and Web readers could easily miss that it is in fact an advertisement.
Such "advertising by stealth" is on the increase as advertisers try to break through the media clutter to sell to increasingly time-pressed, distracted consumers. In some markets and age groups they're also trying to reach consumers who are so sceptical of traditional advertising communications that they literally turn off.
"Generally it's getting harder and harder to reach consumers," says Patrick Hickey of Rothco, a Dublin marketing communications agency.
"Stealth advertising isn't really any different from other forms in that it tries to incorporate itself into the target audiences' lifestyles."
Eoghan Nolan, managing director of Think & Son advertising, says that a suspicious reaction to stealth advertising is born out of memories of subliminal advertising - all those scare stories that corporations were subliminally inserting advertising messages, particularly into television and radio broadcasts, that could only be picked up subconsciously.
"That never happened; all it did was turn consumers into great conspiracy theorists, but the truth is that nobody is that stealthy."
Some of the alternatives to the traditional 30-second advert format are more obvious than others. In US television there are countless examples of the blurring of the line between advertising and programming. A reality adventure series was called No Boundaries - the name of a Ford 4x4 - and the show's sponsor and the car featured prominently in most shots; and in the daytime soap All My Children Revlon bought its way into the story line with a plotline where a character suddenly decides to become a corporate spy in the beauty business where she finds out lots about, well, Revlon.
Movies are loaded down with product placement, some more blindingly obvious than others. At the end of Scooby Doo, just after the credits have rolled, Scooby and Shaggy sit down to a sandwich. Centre shot is a well-known brand of ketchup which is the most loved part of the meal. The scene wasn't part of the plot and is so clearly the result of a deal between the film-makers and the ketchup company that no one, expect perhaps a pester-empowered five-year -old, could be taken in.
While the ketchup scene is a typically clunky product placement, the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report is being heralded as the perfect marriage between Madison Avenue (the home of advertising) and Hollywood.
Steven Spielberg commissioned a Los Angeles advertising agency, 3 Ring Circus, to come up with suitably futuristic advertisements for the movie's sponsors, which included Nokia, Reebok and Lexus. In the movie, advertisements interact with consumers, so when the Tom Cruise character passes a poster for Guinness, the poster recognises him and calls out "John Anderton, you look like you could use a Guinness." Stealth advertising isn't likely to be a feature of the Irish advertising environment any time soon. Budgets here are smaller, campaigns are more conservative and as one advertising director put it, "unless you smack a huge logo in the end shot and repeat the phone number four times in 30 seconds then the client doesn't feel he's got value for money".
