• by David Kaplan , April 19, 2005

While new technologies have allowed advertisers and media planners a broad array of ways to reach consumers, these tools are meaningless if they fail to connect them with marketers, a panel of media researchers noted Monday at the 51st ARF Annual Convention.

In particular, the panelists advised advertisers and agencies to resist the inclination to "fetishize" new media tools and turn to more common sense approaches.

"There are many traditional methods that have untapped opportunity to engage consumers," said J. Walker Smith, the president of market researcher Yankelovich Partners, who gave a presentation headlined "Right Time, Right Place: How to Connect with Your Customer."

"New media are the bells and whistles, but it can't take the place of substantive thinking about the ways we can connect with consumers," Smith said.

The conference was held at the Embassy Suites Hotel in the Tribeca area of downtown New York City.

Smith said that the new media tools that dazzle industry professionals also give consumers greater power to avoid advertising. Furthermore, consumers are more pressed for time and new technologies also displace time spent watching commercials.

In the ebullient, fiery delivery of a southern preacher, Smith told attendees to embrace these technologies' abilities to give consumers more control. Fighting these technologies will only cause consumers to resist marketers' temptations and further alienate them from advertisers.

He cited magazines as a perfect example of a traditional media that allows consumers near total control of whether they become more engaged with a brand or not. And using the relationship as a guide to projecting it on to other media are key to forging better understanding of consumers.

"Things are that are most entertaining and informative to consumers are what will gain the engaged attention of consumers," Smith said. "They want to hold their media accountable. If you let them, they will respond favorably than if you try to do an end-run around them."

Following Smith's presentation by saying, "we'll be true to form - a diffident Englishman and a phlegmatic Belgian," Malcolm Hunter, chief strategic officer for Aegis Group's Vizeum UK, and Philip de Wulf, senior vice president for Aegis sister unit Synovate Censydiam, amplified Smith's views by saying that advertising process should be determined by establishing a particular emotional connection based on figuring out consumers' fleeting moods and adjusting the message to fit accordingly.

"The emotional link between the advertisement and the consumer should determine the message," Hunter said. "From a semiotic viewpoint, the language of advertising stands in contrast to that end. The language of advertising is still one of warfare: campaign, hit, target, strike. How do we deal with problems such as clutter? We shout! We force! We trick! And with consumers being well-armed with ad-avoidance technology, we need to declare a ceasefire and find other ways of discussing this."

Hunter offered up a personal example of the way such ad "tactics" can "backfire."

He noticed an ad for a realtor that offered a free Ford to people responding to a sweepstakes. As he looked closer, he noticed that the prize was actually a toy model. "Well, I was certainly engaged with this ad - isn't that what we strive for - but because I felt tricked by it, I will never look at them again. All they succeed in doing was in alienating me."

In terms of calibrating the message to consumer, Hunter noted that sports programming, for example, promote a feeling of "vitality," while most sitcoms convey a sense of "belonging."

"If I have an advertising message that has a feeling of 'belonging,' I do not want to advertise during a football match, because it creates a natural disconnect," he said.

Getting back to the question of the media and the message, Joshua Chasin, principal for Warp Speed Marketing, lamented what could be the diminishing value of newspapers and magazines, especially when considering the vast differences in media consumption between younger and older consumers.

"There was a recent study that showed that even if you gave away newspapers for free, young people wouldn't take it because they're not used to interacting with print," Chasin said. "And while we can decry focusing too much on new media, that's one of the primary issues the industry is facing."