Let’s say you’ve gone to the airport early morning. Someone walks up to you, and asks you directions to a gate you’re not familiar with. Since you have time to spare, and don’t mind the interruption, you try to help the person out.

Now imagine it’s later in the day at the same airport. You’re late for your flight, and someone asks you the same question. Will you give him the same attention? Finally, a third scenario: You’re late for the flight, the airport is crowded, and this is the fourth person to ask you the same question. What are the chances you will pay any attention at all? You’re probably going to even develop a strategy for avoiding further interruptions –not making eye contact, brushing them off, refusing to help.

This, says Seth Godin, (see book on left) is a lot like the marketing environment today. Godin is one of a new breed of marketers questioning the old principles of interruption marketing, where we look for a medium or an environment where a prospect is likely to use or frequent, and stop him/her with an ad. There is a better way to fight clutter, and it has nothing to do with advertising. Godin, a product of the Internet economy, is no stranger to advertising. In the eighties, he ‘squandered’ (he says) some six million dollars worth of ads for a software company, but questioned the incremental value of ads in an over communicated society. In his landmark book, Permission Marketing, he proposes that marketers have no right to sell to customers. They have to first gain permission to start a relationship that would, somewhere down the road lead to a sale.

But ‘somewhere down the road’ isn’t a very attractive proposition for marketers who have grown up on instant gratification, and been trained to believe that advertising has to move along the ‘AIDA’ continuum –from ‘Attention’ to ‘Action’. Nurturing a relationship first is expensive. Speed is an over-the-counter drug as headline writers recognize (an Intel ad headline declares: "In the surge economy, three year growth projections shift by the hour"). Marketing gurus have always reminded us that there is no time to think, no time to focus. It’s ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’. Tough, too for ad agencies who are being asked to validate their service in more tangible terms, be results oriented, and show ROI. They respond with strategies that will kick that sales curve, with ads that generate short-term response, or, in marketingspeak, ‘create buzz’. It’s this kind of philosophy –to jolt the customer— that generates interruption-style messaging, and advertising must always look for new venues (stickers on apples, product placement in movies), new techniques (intrigue, shock) and new spaces (lavatories, floor-tiles) to fill.

But fighting clutter with more clutter is a losing game. Target audiences, however finely they are segmented, still hate being accosted by advertisements they never set out to meet. Result? They are developing strategies to avoid them lest they interfere with their original purpose. The noise level and the ‘opportunities to see’ which have increased phenomenally, are inversely proportional to people’ attention span.

ASSAULT ON THE SENSES
The deluge has bred different types of prospects. Those that are cynical, simply shrug off the information overload, flip the page, make fun of overblown headlines, zap TV ads, and carry on. Smarter ones attack clutter by fine-tuning their media habits. They block or boycott channels, fast forward through commercials on recorded TV programmes, pre-select Web sites and throw away unsolicited (junk) mail without opening it. The types that marketers ought to fear most aren’t as militant: they have adapted to clutter so well that they subconsciously tune out the message, miss the logos and Web site addresses, and forget the headline. They have acquired a series of filters to counter over-stimulation. Psychologists say that ‘selective memory’ is a defense mechanism against the assault on the senses. We retain only what’s necessary. And that applies to the most media savvy. I once asked a room full of advertising people to match payoff lines with companies, and the recall was zero. These were people who made it their business to employ logos and payoff lines to build value for companies. In fact, some of the companies were not only currently running campaigns, they were even clients of the people in the room! If ad people forget so fast, how then could marketers expect customers to pay attention?

From a different perspective, but issuing the same type of warning, is David Shenk, author of Data Smog. (See book on left). Shenk believes that the incessant barrage of stimuli on our senses creates a stifling environment, giving rise to what he calls a ‘two-by-four’ effect. In a glutted communications environment, where people literally plug their ears (with headphones) and cover their eyes (with dark sunglasses) to avoid stimulus overload, the only way to get their attention is to metaphorically whack them on the head with a ‘two-by-four’. (A ‘two-by-four’ refers to a 2-inch by 4-inch piece of wood sold at home-improvement stores). When the media, the advertisers and the politicians resort to it, the situation only gets worse. The result, he observes, is the class of ‘shock jocks’ (crude radio DJ’s), violent and sexually explicit films and crass publicity stunts that create a ‘smog’.

In September, Nike added to the smog with a well-crafted TV commercial to interrupt the Olympic coverage on NBC. It spoofed the horror flick "Friday the thirteenth", where a barely dressed woman, (US Olympic runner Suzy Hamilton) is attacked by a masked, chainsaw-wielding man. She flees the house and sprints away from her attacker. The commercial ends with the chainsaw maniac stopping to catch his breath. The tagline appears as a question "Why sport?" The answer that follows is "You'll live longer." OK, so it’s a joke, but (notwithstanding how celebrities are often stalked by maniacs) angry viewers forced the station to pull the ad.

Attention through controversy (a la Benetton and Calvin Klein) is one of the worst forms of interruption marketing because it says nothing about the brand. It brings up an interesting question. Does an audience have to actually complain for a marketer to realize the interruption is not creating brand value? Or does consumer outrage validate the interruption technique since, by definition, an interruption is not asked for and therefore appreciated? Six months from now, it is doubtful if viewers will remember Nike’s ‘live longer’ proposition.

There is a lot of new thinking on how not to market to the highly networked customer. The customer now wields power over the marketer, and wants to interact more directly with the manufacturer or service provider. How does a marketer court that kind of person? The short answer is ‘slowly’. Or, as Seth Godin illustrates, there are two ways to approach the customer: as a shameless flirt, or as a gentleman.

FROM PERMISSION TO TRUST
In Godin’s interesting analogy, Mr. Interruption Marketer buys an expensive suit, posh shoes, cool accessories, and walks into a singles bar. There he proposes marriage to the nearest attractive lady. If he is turned down, he repeats the maneuver with the next female, and the next, until he fails miserably. He quickly assesses his failed technique, fires the tailor for making an ineffective suit, and fires the strategy expert who picked the singles bar. But the next day he saunters into another bar attempting to win someone’s hand. But there’s a better way to getting married, says Godin. It’s called dating. After Mr. Permission Marketer first shows interest, it takes many dates for both sides to share intimate details. A few more dates lead to the families meeting, and only then does he propose marriage. Result? That envious long-term relationship.

Courting that customer takes a lot of patience. The aggressive approach, like ‘stalking’, often scares someone off for good. Advertising has a place in the relationship building process. The awareness-interest-desire-action model was relevant when information was scarce, and consumers knew very little about companies behind the products. Today, the problem is not familiarity, but how to turn familiarity into trust. Familiarity into love.

Ever heard of ‘trust marks’? There’s a new-age thinking in advertising that brand management is dead, and that connecting with customers involves a deeper connection through mystery, sensuality and emotion. Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, Worldwide is not your regular ad man. A product of the Proctor & Gamble school of brand management, he likes to say that there are two basic problems with brand management: brands and management! He too believes that advertising has to change in an environment where functional differences between products are small and attention spans are limited. Management, he reminds us, was a discipline relevant to the product economy. Brands, likewise were the product of trademark economy. The attention economy therefore requires a new model, something he called ‘trust marks’. Brands are logical, cold and precise. Trustmarks work in a different dimension. They demand to be touched. He talks of the Zippo lighter, crying out to be handled, and the sensual feel of the Coke bottle that has enormous equity in trust.

Is this the rebirth of ‘relationship marketing’? Recent marketers dismiss the dictates of rational branding that advertising learned from the Ogilvy era, and speak of creating a ‘mystique’ around products. The Volkswagen Beetle, even before it’s nineties comeback was all about emotion. Roberts uses the iMac, Harley-Davidson and Hallmark, as examples of trust marks. Stripped of logical brand-management, they connect with their customers at a sensual level. Emotion is not simply a reworking of nostalgia. He reminds us of the noticeable difference people display when they come in contact with an iMac. "If you’ve got one on your desk, people want to touch it. They want to lean on it. They want to fondle it. You never see anyone act like that with a run-of-the-mill PC". The reason? It is, after all, a chunk of technology that sits on your desk. But who needs to know about the operating system, the USB ports, or that it can run faster than most Pentiums? The product and the marketing are designed around the attention economy, simplifying a complicated piece of technology into a choice of ‘flavours’ (based on their bright colours). Flavours? Certainly, this is not the kind of communication that could have emerged from the Proctor & Gamble school of brand communication!

David Shenk uses a Web banner as an example to define how ridiculous it can get when ads fight smog with smog. It features a monkey sprinting from left to right at tremendous speed, thanks to some clever Java scripting. The viewer is expected to catch the monkey by clicking on it (a thinly disguised ploy to get one to click on the banner). How could anyone recall who the advertiser is, when one’s eyeballs are forced to zip across the screen? When you compare that to a full-page ad for those bright iMacs featuring a one word headline, "Yum", even Seth Godin will have to agree: The latter is a great interruption to have. Until interruption advertising goes away completely.