• by Rick Bruner , June 6, 2005

The Latin root of "advertise"--advertere--literally means "to turn towards." It is the same root for the word "adversary." This sense of confrontation at the essence of advertising may be what undergoes the most radical change in the next decade of marketing sponsorship.

Contrary to popular wisdom, consumers do not hate advertising per se. People continue to buy through catalogs that arrive in their mailboxes; search advertising is booming because people click ads targeted to their queries; and we can all hum a dozen favorite TV jingles.

Yet, in this world of hyper-fragmented media and too many marketing messages, consumers are acting to avoid the overload, paying for the unadulterated media they want, and investing in technology to strip out unwanted ads. With the skyrocketing popularity of blogging and TiVo, iPods, NetFlix, and peer-to-peer networks, consumers are starting to expect more control over their entire media experience, a phenomenon at odds with interruptive advertising.

The popularity of consumer-controlled media arguably has more to do with consumers' desire for the exact media they want when they want it than it has to do with ad avoidance. Nonetheless, the same tools that enable consumers to skip ads if they want to, raise the bar considerably for advertisers.

Procter & Gamble Chief Marketing Officer Jim Stengel told the audience at the American Association of Advertising Agencies' media conference last year: "All marketing should be permission marketing. All marketing should be so appealing that consumers want us in their lives."

"Permission marketing" may not be the best phrase to describe the new era of marketing that is already beginning to take shape. "Service marketing" may be closer to the idea:

--Helping people make purchase decisions when they are seeking advice, such as with search marketing.

--Providing regular product and category information when they request it, as in the case of opt-in e-mail programs.

--Delighting with ads featuring entertaining, funny, intriguing, and challenging content such as adver-movies, adver-games, and other forms of adver-tainment that consumers go out of their way to download or copy the URLs in order to enjoy them repeatedly and forward them to their friends.

Let's call it "invertising," referring to various forms of marketing that consumers invite into their lives.

No other advertisement in any medium in the last 10 years has generated the same amount of excitement in the ad community as the wacky interactive Web site SubservientChicken.com, which promoted Burger King's TenderCrisp sandwich in April 2004. The site allowed users to command the man dressed in a chicken suit to do silly things like "come hither."

A year later, the site remains the subject of analysis in many publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, and The Economist. Why? Because it blended so many of the features that make the Internet a unique marketing opportunity--interactivity, seamless online video, artificial intelligence, irreverence, instant blogability, and the irresistible need to e-mail it to five of your closest friends.

Approximately 14 million people visited the site after an initial e-mail to 20 friends of the developers. The TenderCrisp sandwich is outselling the company's "Original Chicken Sandwich," and Hoovers.com reports that Burger King's revenues rose 18 percent in 2004 to $1.3 billion.

Of course, a stand-alone Web site that depends on viral word-of-mouth alone to prove its success is hardly a scalable model for most advertisers. Jeff Benjamin, interactive creative director of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency behind Subservient Chicken, agrees that ad campaigns should have an important role in viral campaigns of the future. "It's a hard proposition to say that I'm going to spend all this money to design a great viral campaign and then put my faith in e-mailing it to 10 friends to spread the word. You can't count on that."

Benjamin continued: "We realized that using traditional means to support a viral program helps to ignite it, at least in the beginning. Using traditional ads helps reach those trendsetters, like bloggers, more effectively."

To this end, Crispin Porter is including a Web ad campaign to support the launch of its lastest viral sensation for Burger King, SithSense.com, which features a game of 20 Questions with Darth Vader--with often eerily accurate results. Check it out; it's one ad you'll want to revisit and send to your friends.

Rick E. Bruner is Director of Research at DoubleClick.