San Francisco Marketing

While on our San Francisco trip last Wednesday, I noticed something interesting about the ads and marketing in the city. While on the freeway driving in, there were billboards everywhere. On top of buildings, on the sides of buildings; just everywhere the eye could see. Even more so, as we were entering the city, I looked up and saw a plane flying by, trailing a Geico ad behind it.

This got me thinking: the way they have this set up, they're forcing consumers to see their ads. There's really no avoiding it. Marketers are using the fact that there is almost always bad traffic entering San Francisco to their advantage by placing these ads in big, bold, bright letters and colors for the everyday consumer to take in. They're not even trying to be discreet about it.

Because of our critical thinking class, I started wondering: would this be considered breaking through the clutter, as we learned about in The Persuaders? Is this considered a "new way" to get people to see ads? In a way, yes. But also not. It's the same old fashioned ways that a lot of society has learned to tune out. I mean really, if you're speeding down a freeway trying to pay attention to the jerk in front of you that just cut you off, who has time to look up and see that billboard advertising some company? Who has time to pay attention to that? But just as the consumers are like cockroaches, building up resistances to the way that the media is trying to cater to us, the marketers also grow and learn. They learn from their wrongs. Now, they've learned to take advantage of the 21st century dilemmas and locations in order to determine placement of ads.

I'm sure in this case they also use target market profiling to determine which ads go up where. For example, if a marketer stops and considers, what kind of person would be driving into San Francisco in the early mornings? Afternoons? Evenings? They can use different target market profiles in order to determine where the ads go. It's not just a matter of the ads being seen, the ads also need to appeal to that person directly. It needs to be something they lack. For example, I saw an ad for Apple Watch. I'm sure there are plenty of commuters who go through that route every day to get to work, and what businessman is better off without an Apple Watch?

I wonder if, in time, consumers will soon be able to ignore even these very obvious, very in-your-face attempts to get our attention. I wonder if we are strong enough to build a resistance to even that. But one thing that everyone must remember is that, as we as consumers grow and learn and change, so do marketers and their techniques. We've seen it escalate into integrating advertising into our shows with product placement and the like, but how far will it go in the future? How far will marketers go to sell us their products?

More to report.
-M