Water-Drip Torture of Advertising

Sunday's Vikings game was a double whammy of evil and torture. First, the Atlanta Falcons came to town and descended upon us like the vultures they are, stealing our Purple Pride, and forcing us once again into denial that the Vike's really may have it all together this year.
The second bout of true evil was the constant stream of repetitious advertising. It's almost like FOX has an iPod with exactly three songs in it, playing in constant rotation: The Dodge Ram Challenge, Sprint, and Subway. Now don't get me wrong. I love that damn $5 Footlong jingle as much as the next guy -- no really. It plays over and over in my head until I run screaming through the streets. But, really, do I need to see the Dodge Ram Challenge 42 times during the game? The Dodge Ram Challenge, where a bunch of meatheads hopped up on testosterone goofballs are driving through some sort of video-game made-for-reality show of swinging demolition cars and pyrotechnics, is neither a challenge nor something that could legally occur even if you did own a Ram truck.
For those of you not in advertising, let me shed a little light on how this works. Advertising agencies have a problem. The problem is there is no longer a consolidated mass media. Mass audiences began truly deteriorating with cable TV, and the internet has hyper-accelerated it with its 24/7 "TV replacements" like YouTube and Hulu.com. The problem is two-fold. First, creative agencies have much smaller budgets to work with. As such they can create only a very small handful of ads -- or in Dodge's case, maybe two ads altogether. On the flip side, media buyers need to deliver audience to its clients. So viola! You take two finite objects -- the two ad spots and a small audience -- and multiply them by showing the same two ads to the same people over and over again. See? It's purely mathematical!
So where are we heading with all of this? If advertisers can't find audiences and programming needs advertising dollars, is the whole marketplace screwed? Absolutely not. The fact is that marketing and advertising has become really, really scientific, and most of the advertising world is still making the transition to the world of data, behavioral analytics, usability, information design, and, dare I say, accountability. All of us consumers are still here, by the way. We haven't gone anywhere. We just don't all watch the same 10 stations on television or listen to one of 20 radio stations. We're media nomads. Our loyalties are fleeting. And yet, every new media we chose is arguably more measurable than the last one. A web site I visit is infinitely more measurable than FOX television is. Yet, strikingly, the advertising business would have you believe otherwise.
Until the advertising business becomes as scientific as they are creative, expect to see more of the same -- a constant barrage of never-ending repetition on network television. Eventually, brands are waking up and won't take it anymore. The Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS, it's a real acronym) just won't add up.