Today’s Ad Age points to the latest media outlet: the checkout counter.
“Conveyor belts have never been on anybody’s radar screen for marketing,” said Frank Cox, president-CEO of EnVision Marketing Group, a Little Rock, Ark., firm with a patented system to print digital, photo-quality ads directly on conveyor belts. “But a store with eight to 10 checkout lanes, well, you’re talking about 100 square feet of wasted ad real estate.”
What’s interesting to me about this, as Ad Age uses the dubious term “ad creep” to describe it, is that the ad industry simply can’t lay the blame on guys like Cox for this increasing phenomenon. Yes, he smells an opportunity to make some cash and put ads in our faces where they haven’t previously been.
But I teach an advertising concepting class at a highly regarded ad school, and trust me, this kind of thinking is encouraged. Today’s ad students are constantly concepting new guerrilla and environmental ideas, and proposing to put ads and messages in nearly every space you can think of. Which, when they graduate and get jobs at agencies, will be all the more normal. Ad creep won’t go away, believe me.
