The Man Who Can Save Advertising

摘要

In a darkened conference room, shades drawn, a group of executives from the venerable New York advertising agency Foote Cone & Beld-ing are watching a TV spot for Bermuda tourism. With its cheesy music and generic shots of kids splashing around in the water ("This is really cool!"), the ad is precisely the kind of banal irritation that millions of viewers would never think twice about banishing to oblivion with a digital recorder—the device now sending shock waves across the $60 billion television advertising industry and fueling speculation that the demise of the mass-market 30-second TV ad is finally at hand. Not that the baseball-cap-and-flip-flop-wearing creative types gathered here are eager to publicly discuss this or the many other troubling developments besetting their industry. Ad agencies are being squeezed for profits by their parent companies. Clients are paying them less to offset the higher prices broadcast networks are charging for delivering smaller audiences. The Internet continues to siphon off business—Web advertising jumped by 20 percent last year, to $7.2 billion, while spending for TV ads remained flat. And now couch potatoes across America are zapping their little masterpieces with impunity. TiVo-like digital video recorders, currently in 6 percent of U.S. households; are expected to reach 33 percent penetration in the next four years now that cable companies are building them into their digital set-top boxes.