Tag Archives: advertising

A commercial reminder of the importance of the American lawn

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There is little doubt that Americans pay a lot of attention to their lawns and a green lawn is pretty much a necessity in front of the American single-family home. On the way to work today, I heard two grass seed commercials within the same commercial break and they reinforced this interest in lawns.

First, I heard about Pennington Grass Seed. Pennington claimed their bags included all seed while their competitor Scotts only had half a bag of seed and half of bag of filler. Additionally, their seeds required less water. I was invited to go online and check out the science behind the seeds. Second, I heard from Scotts which didn’t name Pennington but went through their claims: Scotts seed doesn’t need more water (actually, it retains water much better than Pennington’s) and it has a special filler whereas Pennington simply uses paper for filler.

Three things struck me about these two commercials:

1. Both ads referred to the science of grass seeds with both claiming they had the better mix. Are consumers really going to pay much attention to this?

2. It was interesting to hear how the two companies approach each other. Pennington went right at Scotts while Scotts didn’t used Pennington’s name (though it wasn’t hard to figure out who they were talking about). From this, can I infer that Scotts is the market leader and Pennington is looking for some way to gain ground?

3. Referring back to my first point, how much of this just really comes down to price and brand recognition? When I go to the store to buy mulch this weekend, would I buy seed based on the science or the price?

What the advertising in the magazines you subscribe to says about you

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One book one of my classes is recently reading, The Suburban Christian,  offered this simple method for measuring your consumption levels (or perhaps what you aspire to consume): look at the advertising and the goods for sale in the magazines that you subscribe to.

This reminds me of something I noticed a few months into my first subscription to The Atlantic. I like this magazine for its reporting and commentary but I noticed that the advertisements were for luxury items I had no hope of buying and had never really even dreamed of buying. These goods were on par with the commercials that suggest that buying your spouse a Lexus with a giant bow on the top is the appropriate Christmas present.

This diagnostic would seem to fit with Juliet Schor’s ideas in The Overspent American about reference groups. Schor argues that media, television in particular, has presented Americans in the last few decades with a distorted view of the middle class. The typical TV middle-class family lives in a large house, seems not have any financial problems or even worries, has all sorts of popular consumer objects, and it is hard to tell if they even work. The average American watches these kinds of shows and starts comparing themselves to these middle-class TV families and raising their consumer aspirations to match what they see. Similarly, magazine advertisements suggest a certain lifestyle or things that the average American needs. These pitches can have a subtle but marked impact on who we compare ourselves to and what we think we need.

The CTA makes it official: will sell naming rights to almost anything

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This has been in the works for a while (particularly with the revamped Apple stop at North and Clybourn on the Red Line) but the CTA officially announced today that it will solicit “bids soon to sell naming rights to just about anything it owns.”

The transit agency expects to award corporate sponsorships by next spring, officials said. Rodriguez said the CTA will go out for bids next week to hire a corporate adviser who will help package the sponsorship opportunities.

“We want to find new ways to generate revenue, and we want to do so in a way that will enhance the experience of our riders for improvements, services and amenities,” Rodriguez said.

But he and other CTA officials declined to offer any estimates on how much money the venture might generate.

“Providing 1.7 million rides every single day is a value to somebody someplace,” Rodriguez said. “The question is, What’s it worth?”

Savvy marketers will want some idea of how much bang they’re getting for their investment, experts say. Marketers also would have to look past the “what-ifs” of having their brand name associated with the unpleasant realities of public transportation, which include unkempt stations, rail line breakdowns and potential crashes.

A couple of things seem remarkable about this:

1. Sociologists are often concerned with the lack of true public spaces in cities (and suburbs). This is bound to have some effect on what were previously public spaces; now there were be even more reminders about corporations.

2. The CTA is going forward with this without being able to say publicly how much money they might be able to raise? This seems foolish. Will they still go forward if bids end up being lower than expected? Might it have been better to line up some more deals before going public with this?

3. How exactly will these new revenues be used within the CTA?

4. What are the next steps for expanding the CTA budget if these deals do not bring in as much money as expected or costs continue to rise and these new revenues are not enough?

5. The agency said it “will be sensitive to avoid naming rights that are in poor taste or at all questionable.” This could lead to some interesting battles over which companies can purchase naming rights and which cannot. What may be responsible to one neighborhood is not necessarily responsible to another.

Ongoing issue of measuring online audiences

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If you were examining Hulu.com’s online audience figures from the last few months, you would find some fluctuation: 43.5 million viewers in May and then 24 million viewers in June. What happened? Did something radically change with the website? Are people abandoning the practice of watching television online?

No, the main change is that ComScore changed its methodology for measuring who used the website. According to the Los Angeles Times:

The three dominant measurement firms — ComScore, Nielsen and Quantcast — have been working since 2007 with an independent media auditing group to make improvements so the Web data they report don’t have a fun-house quality, in which the same site’s traffic can look emaciated or bulging, depending on the viewer’s angle.

These firms have used different measurements over time including panels of users (like Nielsen uses for television and radio) and embedded tags in videos and websites to track viewership. These numbers matter more than ever for advertisers as they will spend around $25 billion in online advertising in the United States in 2010.

As in many cases, knowing the means of measurement matters tremendously for interpreting statistics.