Analysis: The Clutter Patrol
PROMO’S foolhardy staff attaches a number to the marketing world’s most over-used phrase.
“We’re looking to break through the clutter.”
If PROMO’S editors had a dollar for every time we’ve heard that phrase, we’d all be at home writing screenplays right now.
The phrase reached cliché status in the industry a few years back. But that hasn’t stopped many earnest marketers on both sides of the brand/agency fence from proffering those words as the inspiration for their latest campaign which almost assuredly features an “outside-the-box” strategy and “break-through” creative that are sure to “engage” consumers by reaching them at all “touchpoints,” thereby creating a “win-win” situation for all parties.
But we digress.
PROMO decided to conduct some highly suspect and wholly unscientific research to ascertain how much clutter is actually out there. We examined six marketing channels TV, radio, grocery stores, malls, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet in order to find out how many promotional messages the typical consumer encounters in an average day.
We encountered a vast assortment of promotions that, coupled with straight advertising messages, put consumers in almost endless exposure to marketing pitches. In a total of 24 hours (spread out over a week), we found 1,240 promotional offers (give or take a dozen). While some were impossible to miss, the majority would have been avoidable psychologically, if not physically had we not been deliberately looking for them.
In short, we learned that the cliché is valid: There is a lot of clutter out there, and it is difficult to break through it. Here’s what we found.
