Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, John Hilbrich

Anxious marketing managers sense the danger. They know in their bones that the traditional ground of mass advertising has become a less friendly place to stand.

But they panic at their view of the alternatives: an abrupt descent from the frying pan into the world of fire sales, cents-off coupons, and all the other short-term brand-aids commonly lumped together as “promotions.”

These brand guardians have good reason to be scared. They're entirely right to think a careless short-term burn will engulf their brand and destroy it.

The good news is that there is a real escape from this dilemma. For the first time it's safe to make the leap away from dependence on traditional brand TV and print.

MASS SATURATION

For years, we've all heard the doomsday predictions about the declining effectiveness of mass media advertising. What's changed is that this apocalyptic scenario has now made the fateful transition from “forecast” to “fact.” Check out these alarming numbers:

• Compared to the early 1960s, we now have 14 times more TV channels in the average home. Three times the radio stations. And oh yes, one more Internet — with 25,000 streaming broadcast stations and 4.4 billion Google-indexed pages (based on outdated 2004 numbers; the real figures are even higher).

• Real ad spending on prime-time broadcast TV has increased in the last decade by about 40%, according to a recent McKinsey Report, even as the number of viewers has dropped nearly 50% - a crash of nearly two-thirds in eyeballs reached per dollar.

• What's worse, those eyeballs aren't even paying attention to you anymore. Fully 68% of TV-viewing consumers — over two-thirds of the remaining number who watch — are also using other media while “watching” the tube.

• In 2005, only one in 10 U.S. households had a TiVo or other DVR to skip commercials. Their owners say they fast-forward through 92% of the commercials they receive. Now it's one in five. Within three years, Forrester Research predicts it will be one out of two.

It's a self-defeating course of misusing targeted media as if was mass resulting in ugliness: mailboxes stuffed full of junk; e-mail inboxes inundated with spam; trucks cruising the streets with billboards; commercials shoved in front of captive movie theater audiences; ads literally underfoot in the supermarket. It's an avalanche, and only a fool would expect the public to lovingly examine each particle of the mud.

PARALYSIS BY ANALYSIS

When all the evidence screams for a new way of marketing, why do brand managers keep plunging head first into the inferno of mass media orthodoxy? In many companies, it's because brand managers are forced to look not at the marketing evidence, but fearfully over their shoulder at their own company's executive suite.

This excessive caution, in effect, is “risk-free” suicide. No matter how many total exposures you get, becoming part of the blur — a pixel or two in every American's audio-visual wallpaper — is not an efficient use of your marketing dollars.

In today's game, he who spends the most total dollars doesn't always win. Certainly, money is still a must to play the game. But the winners are the ones who seek out a more intimate understanding of their best customers — geographic, demographic and psychographic — then invest selectively to reach them where they live, with a message that's of interest to them.

When brand managers and their agencies act on these principles, the blur magically clears. Today, the line that separates success from failure is the one between expenditures that hit your audience and those that wastefully miss.

This all-important distinction — not the purchase of a traditional media mix through unthinking force of habit — is dictating both the placement and the content of today's most successful campaigns.

John Hilbrich is president, global agency services of The Marketing Store.

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