There’s an old debate raging about ambient media, and your take on it probably depends on where you sit in the media industry’s chain. An umbrella term for all advertising opportunities that reach the audience through unusual vehicles, ambient media falls outside the traditional disciplines of television, radio, print and outdoor. Which means that if you work in any of the first three fields, you’ve probably got a problem with the revenue your editorial content model is losing to the “clutter” merchants.
Then again, if you’re one of those who offer or use this form of advertising, you’re no doubt convinced that it is an acceptable marketing tool – which does not impinge on advertising spend that supposedly should go towards sustaining the “fourth estate”. Naturally, supporters of this medium reject the “clutter” argument too.
“PR stunts which are one-offs create clutter. Our media do not,” says Altmedia director Andrew Kramer, who together with CEO Jason Druian engages in capturing the consumers’ attention via washroom advertising. “We are in the business of taking dead space and creating something vibrant. At home we often go to the loo with a magazine, but in a public toilet there is nothing to engage us.
“Our company takes environments such as washrooms that have graffiti and replace it with a medium that has accessibility and longevity. Some may argue that it is ambush marketing, but if this form of media didn’t work [then] multi-nationals such as those in the United States would not continue to support it.”
Kramer’s diverse range of clients include Siemens, Sony Music and Playstation. “Our client base is so broad that the only thing we don’t advertise is food, for obvious reasons. The space in washrooms work well because we are just sitting there and not distracted, enabling us to absorb what is being advertised.”
Another exponent of ambient media is John Rice of Graffiti, a company that uses branding on vehicles to get clients’ messages across. “I am totally for this form of advertising as a creative and suitable tool,” says Rice, whose satisfied clients include Sasol, Vodacom and Coca Cola. “We are a young and innovative company and we believe in breaking the rules of traditional media.”
Graffiti has been around for 19 years in total, but in its new (current) incarnation for about five. In the beginning the company was about vehicle branding in its simplest form, but the introduction of a new arm has enabled it to offer a variety of vehicles such as Minis, trucks and Smart cars, as well as a diverse range of channels.
Rice argues that clients must have the “freedom to choose which channel they want to use to get their message across.” People, he says, can define where they want to spend there budgets, hence the argument that adspend is being taken away from traditional forms of media is ludicrous: “Branding has been taken to a new, more powerful level, and if clients choose to brand a car rather than spend money on an editorial advertisement then [that] client must believe that what we offer is more suitable to their needs.”
In a similar vein Conn Bertish, Saatchi & Saatchi’s creative director in Cape Town, argues that ambient media is a “potentially powerful way to communicate with your target market when they least expect it.” Bertish believes that if the message is brought across in a bold enough manner and catches consumers off guard while at the same time being entertaining, then it can be an impressive and captivating medium. “I think agencies can take advantage of the strength of this media.”
According to Bertish, the Virgin brand is a great example of the potential of ambient media forms—take Richard Branson creating publicity by brandishing the Virgin logo on his hot air balloon. And Guinness using magnetised keyrings to promote anti-drunk driving was genius, he adds. Why? Because at that very instant when your drunk driver reaches his car and unsticks the magnet and decides to clamber in, he gets sight of the Guinness message and thinks twice. It is the last point at which he has a choice. “It is at that particular moment that you have a captive audience and you are reaching who you were aiming to reach. No television advertisement or print advertisement could have captured that target audience at that crucial moment.”
Paul Bannister, an independent media specialist, is a bit more circumspect: “It is a powerful media type and in advertising it is about getting the message to the market and knowing how media fits in the lives of people. If you have intervention like an advertisement in a pizza box, then you are intruding into someone’s space in an effort to get your message across. [But] if you are successful in getting your message across then you’ve successfully advertised your wares.”
Bannister cautions that some forms of ambient media do create clutter and “some of the stuff becomes wallpaper.” He contends that one message in a pizza box can create an impact but if you order pizza twice a week and you are bombarded with messages then “the medium loses its impact.”
Marcus Brewster of Marcus Brewster Publicity takes this line further, arguing that ambient media is “like a pesky little fly.” Says Brewster: “Contrary to the connotations of ambient in the context of music, ambient media is neither sophisticated nor relaxing. I do not want to be assaulted by another marketing message each time I do something innocuous like open a pizza box or stand at a urinal.”
Brewster continues that ambient media “robs” the consumer of the “right to disengage” from marketing communication, such as one can do during conventional advertisement breaks in television. “Ambient media adds to clutter instead of breaking through. It threatens to reduce our lives to uninterrupted white noise.”
These may all be strong points, but with ambient media it’s always difficult to ignore the utilitarian angle. Jonathan Harris, marketing manager of Vespa South Africa, says that if the message you want to get across is seen then the job is done, irrespective of the tools used to get the brand noticed.
Today, Vespa not only sells scooters, it offers ambient media opportunities to clients as well. “It was not a conscious choice, but we saw ourselves moving into this form of marketing simply because there were increased enquiries from corporates who wanted to use their vehicles as an ambient tool in competition with rival companies.”
The monies spent on transforming a scooter from a traditional solid-colour vehicle that delivers goods to one that performs the same job and shows off a brand are nominal, but the results can be phenomenal, Harris says. He is convinced that when you’re at a traffic light and a branded vehicle is ahead of you, you end up reading the brand whether you want to or not. “Of course there’s the argument that the impact of the vehicle is less than that of a billboard, but then there’s the debate of where the billboard’s positioned.”
Of course, positioning and impact notwithstanding, there are those that simply dislike the connotations that go with being outside the mainstream. Pierre van der Hoven, owner of Three Blind Mice, a company that offers advertising opportunties on television screens in banks and airports, believes his medium is extremely effective, adding that the term “ambient” is “total rubbish because it is not on the periphery of advertising, it is the real deal.”
With the global backlash against brand clutter and books like Naomi Klein’s No Logo, it’s small wonder that there are some who don’t appreciate being lumped with the “advertise anywhere” gang. But while No Logo speaks of the evils of global brands exploiting workers in the developing world, it also highlights the issue of “culture jamming”, where protesters attempting to spoof existing big brand names have only succeeded in reinforcing their marketability. So ultimately there is no respite from branding, whether in taxis, buses, inside lids of pizza boxes, or public washrooms. Ambient media may be a dirty word in some circles, but like it or not the marketing muscle of multinational clients is moving it into the realms of the conventional.