Welcome Peter. You find yourself in great company. It's what we in the south call "tall cotton!" Congrats. I look forward to reading your posts.

Welcome Pete. Great way to begin.

I've been a business management, marketing and communications consultant for a lot of years, and I can't remember the last time I urged a client to invest in advertising messaging, in any format.

Story-telling, relationship-building and sharing ideas and solutions provided by products and services that help my client's customers are far more powerful in reaching my clients' markets and much more economical and beneficial to their bottom lines.

In other words, create communications about customer's wants, needs and solutions, not about our products and services. More important, create great customer experiences in everything we say and do.

Great post Peter! We are always bombarded with media presence everywhere. New avenues for ad apending are added literally everyday. I always prefer quality over quantity.

Pete,
Thanks for mentioning the presentation. I, too, struggled to unearth academic proof of the "500 - 5000" range; partially because the number continues to change (and grow) over time.

For the record, I pulled the "3000" from a 2005 Inc.com article on the Future of Advertising. Here's an excerpt/link to the source: “On average, Americans are subject to some 3,000 essentially random pitches per day. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a Yankelovich Partners study said they feel “constantly bombarded” by ads, and 59% said the ads they see have little or no relevance to them.” http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050801/future-of-advertising.html

With the relatively ceaseless proliferation of media & technology, I'd venture to guess 3000 is a very conservative estimate.

But I'm no academic ;)

Only 5,000? Welcome aboard, Peter.

Congrats on your first Daily Fix post, Peter.

Whether the actual number is 500 or 5,000, we are overloaded with ad messages every day. Most don't crack the wall of our consciousness -- they're just out there, but we don't really absorb or think about them.

Hi Paul - thanks. I'm actually from the South, but the land of tobacco and bourbon, so thanks for the insight.

Hi Lewis - absolutely, experiences are where it's at. Then customers will tell others about products and services instead.

Hi Abhi - you remind me that my friend Max Kalehoff is putting an OMMA event together, looking for marketers with success in untraditional ad placements. I suggested Golden Palace. Are they quality? Certainly not quantity...

Hi Marta - sorry for picking on you. Great presentation BTW. When Ilya and I were brainstorming, we wondered what constituted an impression, outside of paid placement. E.g. does a shirt logo or soda can count? Probably - which means that we probably see hundreds on our lunch break alone. To your point, Floyd.

HI David - thanks and agreed; people are so overloaded with clutter that some advertisers have decided to resort to brute force interruption while others look toward experience instead...

Hi Peter,

Nice post and welcome aboard from one Daily Fix contributor to another.

Consumers today are so bombarded by advertising messages that I like to say much of the ads now are going to dead letter offices. While most companies have to include advertising in their marketing budgets, it's more effective to really hire and train great personnel to deliver top notch customer service. It's also a good idea to invest in some Web 2.0 strategies to empower the customer. Any and all customer-facing aspects of the business should be scrutinized, improved if need be--and aligned with the overall brand positioning and messaging for long-term sustainability and success.

Looking forward to reading more of your articulate material, Peter.

Welcome, Peter!

I agree with most of what Ted and Lewis have said, especially in B2B and services marketing. However, I believe the exception is the mass market product. It is more beneficial to get the message out to targeted consumers than to focus on individual relationships. Companies must still build relationships with distributors and retailers, but unless they build market demand for their products from the end user, who is going to buy them?

Hi Ted - I love the dead letter office analogy. And let's be honest - a lot of people make a living from shipping and handling fees, thus refuse to break from the old system/process.

Hi Elaine - I hear you and think what we're saying here applies to all markets. To your point, we need to build awareness and brand recognition. Grease the skids to get products on shelves. Then to Lewis and Ted - make sure our products and services deliver on the promises made by our brands - so the process becomes easier the next time around, aided by customer and consumer word-of-mouth.

Pete -- Nice kickoff! I'm thrilled to have you here.

Peter,

Welcome to the Daily Fix (I'm starting out this week as well). I think your point helps us to re-think the idea of "reach". Often, we think in terms of how many (breadth). How many people, how many impressions - but that can be awfully shallow. Instead, we need to think about the the DEPTH of our reach - if we reach deep into the affections of our customers, it will ultimately be far more effective marketing (and, of course, less annoying!)

Peter, while I agree with you about the need of qualitative reach, I suggest that the issue stands in the measurement. Today, a marketing manager is asked to deliver a number of ratings in TV and this may prove to generate awareness and awareness may generate sales. True? false? I suppose it is not 100% true anymore. Which media or which communication can deliver this quality reach? Today we still have poor metrics about the performance of the Web. Even the smartest marketers have to admit that they feel and know that being social has helped their sales but they have no clue about it. If we want to shift from the profile of hype media to the standing of efficient media, we have to find a way to measure the delivery of the social media and not to measure what we believe is the potential weakness of the mainstream media.