Everywhere you look these days, there's an organisation concerned with "meeting your needs". Flying above you in the sky, walking towards you dressed as a colossal soft drink, in front of you on train station walls, on your radio and your television.
In fact the day has come when you can't as much as pop into the loo for a quiet moment of relief without coming face to face with information about a product you "need". Advertising is everywhere, from blimps to buses. Lit up with fairy lights, perched in 3D on a billboard, cheekily peering out from blockbuster films in the form of "product placement".
The most popular media used by advertisers go through different phases. A couple of years ago, the big thing was outdoor advertising, from sides of buses to the walls of the DART line.
With so many thousands of publications to choose from, the press is still the most popular medium, with television coming a close second in the popularity polls. At the moment the big buzz is the World Wide Web. It's not used all that much yet, but there is a tremendous amount of excitement about it. Website advertising is part of the general trend away from mass marketing - whereby companies might seek to "reach" all adults aged 20 to 30 with a message about a product - towards a more individualistic approach. Away from demographics, towards psychographics, in fact. Hmmmm . . .
The thinking behind all this psychobabble is that all adults aged 20 to 30, even if they fall into the same broad social category, don't necessarily "need" the same thing. We're far more individualistic than that: some of us are 23-year-old women working for an accountancy firm, who listen to the Corrs and watch ER on the telly every week; some of us are 29-year-old men who make abstract paintings, listen to David Holmes and watch South Park on the telly every week. Very different needs there, wouldn't you think?
Which is where new developments such as direct marketing comes in. Essentially this is advertising a product to the people most likely to buy it. It's a way to cut down on the "wastage" you get when you send a message to everyone who's in watching the Late Late on a Friday.
a relationship
Companies that make the products which the various human types may have an interest in increasingly recognise the importance of building up "a relationship" with the consumer. So you get a firm such as Superquinn, which has a useful database of information through its Superclub card system, and is able to mail out special offers on particular products directly to the customers who are most likely to buy them. Rather than send every single shopper the same letter about the offer on nappies, for instance, Superquinn now has the information to send that letter to parents of under-threes only. The consumers most likely to buy are pleased to hear about the offer and, ideally, decide to buy the nappies - and there is no waste of money and time with letters to people who hate children and never want to see the inside of a nappy, or a packet of them even.
Of course the whole idea that advertisers are offering you something you need which will make your life much better is a bit of a distortion of the truth. In fact, our "needs" as human beings don't really cost a lot of money. Which is a bit of a problem for someone who has a product to sell. So advertisers have to sit and work out some way to show us just how wonderful our lives could be, if only we'd buy a new . . . whatever. Drink Diet Coke, and your sex life will be transcendental, for instance. Over the years, advertisers realised that people have a certain selfimage they like to project. Perfect. It was just a question of getting a handle on these, and figuring out ways to sell accordingly. If you like to think of yourself as the young, bubbly party type who just can't stop, and you'd like to convey that to people you meet, buy Pringles. Or perhaps you see yourself more as the four-year-old who watches The Simpsons and knows all the lyrics to the latest Spice Girls hit - you need a Furby.
Products are packaged and sold to us in such a way that we end up feeling we really, really do need them. But we're not stupid - all the time. Consumers are increasingly sophisticated and know when something is playing on their insecurities. Advertisers also have to stay on top of a very competitive market and constantly come up with new ideas which will attract some attention. And that's why ads are at least as likely to be packed with bright ideas as the newspaper, television programme, website or pub that's providing space for them.
