The world’s biggest radio company is planning to launch the world’s smallest advertisements — one-second spots that will be over by the time you realise they have begun.
Clear Channel, which owns 1 200 American radio stations, has created several demo versions of the ads, called ”blinks”, including one which takes the music used with the McDonald’s slogan ”I’m lovin’ it”, removes the words, and sandwiches the remaining sound between the end of one song and the start of another.
”It really is to find new uses of radio for advertisers who are continually asking us to demonstrate that our medium can successfully extend brands, can successfully reach the consumer with touchpoints that are new and surprising,” Jim Cook of Clear Channel told the trade publication Advertising Age.
No deal has yet been struck with advertisers, the magazine said, adding that several brand-related sounds suggested themselves as obvious contenders, such as the four-note chime used to market computers containing Intel chips.
”There’s one thing alone you can do in that period: register the brand name in the mind of the consumer,” Daniel Howard, professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said.
”When you’re in a supermarket and you don’t know which product to buy, one of the heuristics [methods] people most frequently use is names … It’s like in American politics: vote Smith, vote Jones. Why? Because when people go into polling booths, many of them don’t know the issues. What they do is they vote for the name that seems most familiar.”
Ultra-brief ads are not new but they could wreak havoc with the monitoring on which the US market relies, which can only track ads lasting at least five seconds. – Guardian Unlimited Â