• by Joe Marchese , April 3, 2007

Advertising clutter (aka noise) is the subject of a recent Advertising Age article. How many ad units are you exposed to on any given Web page -- banner, page sponsor ads at the right and bottom, center box etc.? Flashing banner ads, rope the bull, score the winning basket, win an iPod, fake system error messages, shocking ad copy -- anything to induce a click. On television noise can be literal volume. Ever watch a program loud to begin with, then the commercials come on and they are so loud the whole room looks for the remote to turn down the volume? Heard of towns recently voting to restrict outdoor advertising as it gets out of hand?

The solution to-date for marketers to cut through all the noise? Turn up the volume on their marketing campaigns, of course. This is inevitably followed by the obvious response of all other marketers pumping up the volume on their campaigns. The end result is that consumers are inundated with massive amounts of advertising messages, with each marketer trying to shout over its competition and catch consumers' attention at every turn. Consumers adapt and learn to block, ignore, mute, and skip advertising. Far worse for the marketers, consumers grow irritated with the competition for their attention. So markets adjust the frequency and timing of their messaging (i.e., we don't see pop-ups any more) and the cycle of yelling over each other starts again.

It comes down to this. If all marketers spoke to consumers only in places where they were invited, and only where their message was relevant to content and consumers, then everybody wins. But this doesn't happen for a reason. The most logical outcome for advertisers is to continue to yell over each other until the market corrects (again, as it did with pop-ups, is doing with TiVo and will do with social media). What is occurring is advertising's prisoner's dilemma.

Here's how prisoner's dilemma is defined on Wikipedia (the emphasis is mine):

"In game theory, the prisoner's dilemma is a type of non-zero-sum game in which two players can 'cooperate' with or 'defect' (i.e. betray) the other player. In this game, as in all game theory, the only concern of each individual player ('prisoner') is maximizing his/her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff. In the classic form of this game, cooperating is strictly dominated by defecting, so that the only possible equilibrium for the game is for all players to defect. In simpler terms, no matter what the other player does, one player will always gain a greater payoff by playing defect. Since in any situation playing defect is more beneficial than cooperating, all rational players will play defect."

In advertising's prisoner's dilemma, to start a shouting match is the defect. No matter what the competition does, it's better to speak just a little bit louder than everyone else. If everyone else talks more quietly, then you stand out. If everyone else yells, at least you don't get drowned out. Again, this only lasts until marketers' shouting hits critical mass and the market corrects. With agency reviews and turnover rates what they are, there is no reason for agencies to corporate to reach the win-win, because there is no way to punish a defecting agency (there's obviously a number of other reasons we don't have time for here).

But if advertisers are playing the game exactly as they logically should, how will the advertising industry ever escape the lose-lose quadrant of advertising's prisoner's dilemma -- and worse, a consumer backlash? The game needs a moderator and the moderator needs some help. The moderator is the content publisher and the help is the technology to distribute and compensate at full and fair market value the influence delivered by that publisher.

The difficultly here is twofold. First, advertisers aren't the only ones facing a dilemma. Given current market technologies and compensation methods, the best way for publishers to earn more revenue is to place more ad units that simply add to the noise. Second, in order to compensate at full and fair market value a publisher that runs only one brand advertisement, new and universally accepted units of measurement must be developed that account for the total value of a message delivery and brand association.

There is a lot of hidden value here that has yet to be measured, but if measured and compensated for could induce publishers to be the moderators needed to break the cycle of advertising's prisoner's dilemma. That is, a publisher could insist that advertisers only speak in inside voices to their viewers; that only those messages viewers or their content want to hear are allowed in. This of course would require technologies and markets not pervasive in today's market and some level of publisher choice enabled by these technologies and markets. This, in the end, will allow publishers and advertisers alike to realize the benefit of marketing moving into the win-win quadrant and prevent the consumer revolt (bubble burst/napster/pop-ups/TiVo) by reaching advertising's Nash equilibrium.

I would like to cite the HeadOn commercials, my favorite proof of advertising's best interest to move to defect (deafening shouting). I can't cite a better example of shouting above the noise with no regard for the viewer. But it works, because compared to HeadOn's commercials every other commercial is whispering. But if more marketers took the HeadOn approach to commercials, how fast would TiVo see demand increase? As a matter of fact, I don't think I would be surprised to uncover years from now that TiVo actually heavily subsidized HeadOn's media buys...