A Study on Ambient Advertising: Marketing Novelty Going Bust

Mr. Shuvam Chatterjee Assistant Professor-Marketing Department of Management Studies Institute Of Science and Management, Ranchi, Jharkhand.India. Abstract Ambient advertising is a form of advertising done in a non-traditional media or using a medium in a way it has never been used before either as part of the mainstream campaign or as a stand alone activity. It helps brands be more a part of people's lives, say advertising professionals. Ambient advertising is a brand message that hits, when least expected. It is not restricted to any size, shape or format. Ambient advertisements are effective means at pushing a brand message in front of consumers and can develop even better top of mind recall within target audiences. This provides the ability to advertisers to maintain brand awareness created by other advertising efforts. Ambient media can produce mass attention in centralized locations, or directly interact with consumers during normal every day activities. This paper tries to throw light on the concepts of Ambient Advertising, its problems and tries to come out with recommended solutions to make this form of advertising popular in the near future. Keywords: Brands, Ambient Advertisement, Consumer Awareness, Memory Revisit,Novelty

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Concept Have we ever walked into a mall and looked at those banners on the side of the escalators or hired a cab which talked about a product on the back of the drivers seat or walked into local train to catch ourselves reading all those messages on the hand support, well we have been officially affected by the phenomena called Ambient Advertising. Ambient advertising as the name suggest has got a lot to do with the ambience or the environment. It is different from the traditional media advertising which is printed on pages or broadcasted on television. It has truly been successful throughout the world to different extent. It has its roots in Concord Advertising, a U.K Agency specializing in outdoor campaigns, which started it in 1996. It came from what was an increasing request from clients for something a bit different in their advertising. Why Ambient Advertising Some say it is not something new but just an obvious extension of advertising space due to the traditional media becoming either expensive or ineffective. Others argue that as a concept it is truly innovative and evolved simply from one word Surprise. The most important aspect of any advertisement is to break the clutter or drawing the perspective consumers attention. This is where ambient advertising fits and it does that really well. It gives the consumer a message where he or she least expects, thus attracting genuine attention of the consumer having a much more lasting impact. Once the concept was started, it was felt that the sky was the limit because one could look for more and more places to advertise, which till that time were not even considered. Even outer space is not safe from commercialization. The Russian Space program launched a rocket bearing a 30 foot Pizza Hut logo and some companies have investigated placing ads in space that would be visible from earth, proving the fact that indeed the companies have taken this concept very seriously. Reasons which led to the rise of Ambient Advertising A> Short term focus in Industry ( Jones 1990 Srivastava 1991 ) As more and more markets are maturing they had started focusing on small targets in terms of growth of sales, profits etc. They were driving the factors of various market segments. This was pushing all these markets to come up with solutions for the short term from the marketing point of view. Thus most of the marketing initiatives were planned to help the marketers fulfill those short term targets to save their own jobs. B> Greater focus on Accountability ( Reed 1997 ) With the consumers becoming highly aware with the rise of media and the increasing competition, the sales margins were becoming thinner each day. Thus to increase profitability, the only place that the companies could work on is to decrease various costs involved. Gone were the days when marketers could spend as much money as they wanted in the name of brand building, advertising budgets were becoming much more controlled, thus making marketers prove the effectiveness of various initiatives that they launched. Return on investment became the key, which led to the increase of low investment initiatives.

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C> Decline in Media Advertising Effectiveness ( Reed 1997 ) The traditional media had become highly cluttered with advertisements and promotions. The effectiveness of that medium was in question especially for smaller firms. Getting their target consumers listen to them had become the biggest challenge for these firms. It is said, if you are not being heard, you have to shout, ambient advertising was the long needed medium to fulfill this need. D> Proliferation of Brands ( Reed 1997 ) The number of brands in the market was rising each day, there was a lack of communication channels and medium. These new brands had to find a way to communicate their message in the most effective manner to their consumers. The previously successful mediums were either too expensive or too ineffective. There was a need to do something different from the rest. E> Better Targeting This medium could easily be tailor made for the consumers that the particular brand wants to target. For example, if there is a brand which is selling cars, targeting the consumers who are presently using local trains makes sense which can easily be done by using innovative places on the platform and the trains to attract attention and make them realize their need. If one wants to talk to a child then advertising on his or her books might actually be very effective. Initial success of this novel idea was almost certain because it was a perfect fit to the industry needs. Ambient Advertising- The Indian Context It has not been a long time since we have seen the rise of such advertising in this country. It is a simple equation of crowding out of the traditional media which evidently did not start happening in India till the early 2000s. One of the first attempts to ambient advertising in India could be seen during the fetes and fairs which are common event during Indian festivals. These had enough opportunities to Surprise consumers. As with rest of the world, once this idea started, indeed sky was the limit. Today we see this type of advertisements all over the country especially the cities, be it those billboards which look like as if they are moving from a moving metro train or be those advertisements of magazines which come on your newspaper receipts. Take a walk around the modern malls of big Indian cities and you are bound to walk onto those new floor posters of one brand or the other. But India is a different market altogether. We need to attract attention but the means to do so have to be kept within the sensibilities. Some of the outrageous ways to break that clutter which have been used in the West should never be attempted in the Indian context. Indians are by nature more private people and hence brazen advertising tactics has a chance of turning them off and generating negative word of mouth. Advertisements on medical prescriptions, on school receipts, on temple brochures and bottles of mineral water etc.infuriate people not known to associating these things with commercialization. Ambient Advertising has to tread on its toes in India.
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Problems with Ambient Advertising The inherent features leading to its success are the placement of advertising in unusual and unexpected places(location) often with unconventional methods(execution), and being first or only ad execution to do so(temporal) (Luxton and Hammond 2000). But indeed these are the factors which might lead to its fall, which are as follows. 1> Location The beauty of keeping those messages at places the consumer would not ever imagine is that such are the places which would have maximum recall. But the question to be asked is whether this would actually communicate our message in the right spirit and that too to substantial numbers which would eventually justify our investment. 2> Execution The idea in this type of advertising is to make the execution so different and in turn interesting that the perspective consumers remembers the same even when the experience is over but the critique of this factor lies in the interesting execution itself. It is widely accepted that more interesting the execution is, the higher is the attention the audience gives to a certain communication. But because in case of ambient advertising the interesting part is the medium itself, the recall of the message might actually be lower than that of the way it was communicated, thus leading to be able to have strong advertising recall but a comparatively much lower key message recall. 3> Temporal One of the innovations in the form of advertising mediums was hot air balloons in various shapes and sizes with communications of various brands and products printed on them. The novelty factor made them an instant hit among the advertisers but soon it was realized that their attention grabbing capacity had an exponential fall. Thus the advertisers have to look for more and more places to communicate the same message. 4> Visually Polluting It is a famous saying that certain things are best kept untouched and many believed that our immediate environment in towns and cities should not be excessively filled with different types of communications. Given the size of the market becoming bigger each day, there is a so called visual pollution which has started happening. It can be attributed to both lack of advertising space and extreme innovation to get that space. But all this is having a bad impact in the experience of the consumer and thus can negatively impact the brand for which the communication is intended. Also with innovations running through, the industry is becoming very difficult for firms to understand where they should draw the line. For example, a graveyard might have the right target fir an agency involved in matchmaking especially for the widowers but the coffin although would be surprising but is definitely not the right place to advertise.

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Measurement of effectiveness (Bhargava and Donthu 1999) With the increasing number of mediums and every product seeing the growth of Integrated marketing Communication ( Schultz 1991 ), the idea of using ambient advertising as a standalone medium of communication is indeed not possible, thus understanding or measuring the impact of effectiveness of an add-on medium like ambient advertising is almost impossible. Peek into the Future The problem if this becoming visually polluting is still not too big in India because of relatively late entry and less consumerism. But things are rapidly changing on that front. Other problems continue to affect the minds of those who might be interested. Bug companies still prefer the traditional media while smaller ones would rather give a pamphlet in local newspaper rather than racking up their brains and coming up with something which is certainly innovative but risky in terms of results. Ambient Advertising needs to function like Google Ad Words to survive. It needs to be around the corner, available but unobtrusive. It needs to be more context specific; the days of the local sweet shop or pawn broker advertising on a village event are gone. The purchase and the context of it determine the content and even presence of the advertising. Ambient advertising has scope with the increasing commercialization and growth of Indian consumer demand, the areas to use such below the line advertising tactics increases. However, as stated before, some form of allying of the advertising with the context in which the user comes across the advertisement is necessary for it to fuel growth and generate a return on investment on it. Moreover, due to problems in measuring its effectiveness, Ambient Advertising can only be judged empirically on trial and error and hence the investment a firm is ready to commit on it is set to remain low. This however will remain a problem unless some metric of recall of ambient advertising plus any positive impact emerges. Conclusion Indeed given all these issues and advantages, Ambient Advertising which is sensitive to the Indian consumer still has a lot of potential in the advertising business especially in the present economic situation, given its low cost and high innovation.

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References 1> Bhargava, Mukesh; Naveen Donthu (1999), Sales Response to outdoor Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, New York, July 2010. 2> Jone, John Phillip (1991), When Ads Work-New Proof That Advertising Triggers Sales. New York, Lexington Books. 3> Luxton, Sandra and Drummond, Lachlan (2000), What is this thing called Ambient Advertising? Monash University-Caulfield Campus. 4> Reed, Peter (1997), Marketing Planning and Strategy, Marrickville, NSW, Australia, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Group, Australia Pty Ltd. 5> Schultz Don (1991),Strategic Advertising Campaigns, Lincolnwood, IL, NTC. 6> Srivastava, Rajendra K. and Allen D. Shocker (1991), Brand Equity: A perspective on its meaning and measurement, Massachusetts, USA, Marketing Science Institute.

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