July 23rd, 2006
Place Your Ad Here, and Here
By Julie Bosman
New York Times
It was a rough week for consumers weary of ad creep. CBS announced plans to etch messages onto eggs promoting its fall lineup, Nickelodeon said it would stamp images of SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer onto packs of fruit, and US Airways said it would begin selling ad space on motion-sickness bags.
Cheap stunts, or strokes of marketing genius? It may be too soon to tell, but the allure of odd venues—to advertisers, at least—has a long history. The industry’s hypercompetitive ad mavens have placed marketing messages in even weirder places before, rocketing them into outer space, affixing them to urinals and tattooing them onto foreheads.
A search for unusual advertising mediums leads back at least to the late 19th century, when the smiling face of the Quaker Oats man was plastered on the sides of freight trains throughout the country, among the first ads to appear on trains.
Trains not big enough? Barns dotting the Midwest at that time began to be painted on all sides with the message ‘’Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco,’’ a practice many farmers allowed because the tobacco company painted the entire barns free.
Pizza Hut did barns and trains one better. It boasted the first ad in outer space when it paid to have a 30-foot logo stamped on the side of a Russian rocket in 2000.
Not long after, consumers latched onto the trend of auctioning off ad space on their own bodies, putting tattoos of company names on foreheads, cleavage and even pregnant bellies.
Though US Airways may have been the first to think of advertising on motion-sickness bags, airplanes are already blanketed with ads on tray tables, napkins, headrests and in-flight magazines.
Where might advertisers go next?
‘’Maybe ads showing up in church,’’ said Chris Wall, a chief creative officer at the advertising agency Ogilvy New York. He then suggested a more macabre possibility: ‘’Would you bury someone you love in a branded casket?’’