Are you still paid to interrupt?

Hat tip: Brij Singh

On March 18th, Ad Age’s Digital Marketing conference in NYC gets underway. That afternoon, one conference session will be dedicated to digital screens. The session description on their site reads: “Screens, Screens Everywhere Digital screens are cropping up in the most unlikely places, from bars to gas pumps to airports.”

It seems that this is the approach a lot of marketers (or perhaps, more specifically, advertisers) take towards new technology – they use it to interrupt people in slightly new ways. Flat panel TVs can be placed almost anywhere, so the advertising world decides that they should be placed most everywhere.

My bet is that, in many situations, these are rather unwelcome distractions. Case in point: Irving Oil, here in Atlantic Canada, rolled out audio attachments to their gas pumps a few years back. Once you started pumping, the ads started streaming. Until, of course, you turned it off. Or, as one gas attendant told me here in Halifax, some people went so far as to beat the device off of the pump and throw it in the trash.

As we move ever closer to reaching peak attention, I think many marketers find themselves half-pregnant. While they may understand that permission-based community participation / engagement is a better way, they’re still paid to interrupt.

Comments

[Mark Dykeman]

I've been to Woodfield Place (formerly BCE Place) several times during the past years and I was originally amazed that they had flat panels in elevators. However, most of the content was news-oriented with minimal advertising and it actually seemed quite useful. Maybe there's something to that model to consider.

[Mark Dykeman]

Erm, sorry, my bad - the new name for BCE Place is Brookfield Place.

[cpirie]

I've found that there is a rather broad range of business models when it comes to digital screens, Mark. Most exchange some level of utility / usefulness for attention to ads of some sort or another.

As an example, Volt Media is a Halifax-based company that places digital screens in on-campus environments - streaming campus news, weather, etc. while also streaming ads.

Having said all that, I am contrarian enough on some days to just say we should dispense with all of it in favour of keeping our environment - built and natural - less cluttered.

[Ron MacInnis]

I agree with Carman on the subject of clutter and...tranquility...
We are organic creatures in a digital world, slowly, biochemically stitching neurons together to form a web of thought patterns, in a world that feeds us information at a speed that is beyond the capability of our tiny processors.
As do the computers that surround us, when we take in more than we can process, we freeze. (We don't even have Sundays any more to process what we store in memory).
I think, as a society, that's where we are now: frozen in a state of overload.
Iutuitively, we all know this. And that's why the guy smacked the chattering commercial voice box while he was filling his tank at the Irving station. (I would have knocked it off if he had not.)
What a world, huh?
Wouldn't it be nice if the elevator doors opened one day and instead of a flat screen, there was a chair, and a small table with a lotus flower on it...

[Mark Dykeman]

@Carman - looking at my desk ATM, I can certainly appreciate less clutter!

@Ron - do we "freeze" during times of info overload, or do we simply "tune out" and keep going with whatever we've absorbed to date? Perhaps we don't even absorb, perhaps we just discard.

[ron macinnis]

Hi Mark:
I don't think it matters if we as a species "freeze" or "tune out." Point is that down deep, where the old animal brain kicks in, we know we are "missing something." And to any animal, us included, that is cause for angst: for dis-ease. And disease, ultimately.
We are slowly killing ourselves as a society, and blatting, blaring, clumsily orchestrated, omnipresent commercial messages are a large part of the problem.

[cpirie]

Interesting discussion gentlemen - and thank you for stopping by. There is an edge in this discussion that I find myself walking a fair bit.... since I live a somewhat dual life as both a marketer and a host (facilitator to some....).

As a marketer, I am in many ways paid to create clutter. The hope, of course, is that it is intelligent or strategically sound clutter - but it's clutter nevertheless.

As a host, I find a good part of my initial work in most situations (like day 1 of a 3-day offsite for example) is to in some manner clear a path through all of the clutter so that people can meet each other on a more human level.