August 19th, 2004
Extreme Advertising: What Lengths They'll Go To
By Diane Sawyer
Good Morning America
DIANE SAWYER, ABC NEWS
(Off Camera) In this over stimulated world, you can imagine that advertisers are always looking for a way to get through. And guess what the new commercial billboard is? Your body, a potentially money-making billboard. In fact, you may have seen yesterday the Olympic diving event, at which the man in the tutu, the Canadian had an on-line casino’s web-site written on his chest.
DIANE SAWYER
(Voice Over) And everybody paid attention, and he’s not the only one. There’s a, a smaller stage on e-Bay, a man is offering his bald head, and he says, for $60,000 a year he will have the name of your company tattooed on it and go to very big events for one entire year, $60,000. And so, we started looking into this a little more and discovered that these guys are not alone.
DIANE SAWYER
(Voice Over) Let’s face it, we’re in the middle of an advertising meltdown, every single vacant space in America, a potential billboard.
graphics: 5000 messages
DIANE SAWYER
(Voice Over) Get this, you and I now see up to 5,000 advertising messages every single day of our lives. 5,000. As an experiment, I documented my own ad exposure along just a few blocks of, where else, Madison Avenue.
graphics: gma ad-cam counter
DIANE SAWYER
(Voice Over) Bus, taxi, front of the bus, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13. Signs up there. Advertising for the newspaper, of course. Look, the truck. What does it say on the top of his cap? Oh, Sean Jean’s. No wonder the advertisers are trying to go where no man has gone before. How about the human billboard, the woman paid for her, well, available space to walk around at the US Open. Take a close look at this chaste view of her back, the same ad for a gambling web-site was on the front as she made a streaking tour of the 11th hole. The network censored the broadcast, but the advertiser won. For a while this was the most e-mailed image on the Internet.
GARY RUSKIN, COMMERCIAL ALERT
Essentially, advertising industry is working overtime to stick an ad in front of our eyes at every waking moment.
LINDA KAPLAN THALER, KAPLAN THALER GROUP
People are just fighting to get part of your brain.
DIANE SAWYER
(Voice Over) If so, Dunkin Donuts bought the next best piece of real estate, when it paid college students in Boston to plaster temporary tattoos on their heads during televised basketball playoffs. The agency responsible, Bennett Global Marketing, which brags that the free coverage was worth half a million dollars. And NASCAR, of course, long ago sold space on everything but the rear-view mirror. But leave it to the Japanese to come up with a racecar idea that only the Japanese could love. Think “Saturday Night Fever,” geisha-style. Cultured girls like this classical pianist keep a secret life in the closet. They don the sequins and become what are called race girls. They’re pop icons who speak in elegant phrases, can talk about Mozart and smile modestly above their miniskirts. They not only show up for the races, but make appointments with fans for well-mannered photography sessions in the park.
JAPANESE RACECAR GIRL FAN, MALE
I feel like I fell in love with Ive(PH) every time I photograph her, like we having relationship.
DIANE SAWYER
(Voice Over) And it’s not just the sports world desperately seeking space. Everyone is still talking about the latest Internet entry from Burger King. The subservient chicken web-site. Yes, a character in a chicken suit takes your instructions. Just type in “kneel.” Type in “dance.” Type in “deep fryer.” Reportedly, there have been 200 million hits on this site since April alone, though there’s still some who suspect the chicken idea could bite you back.
LINDA KAPLAN THALER
Sometimes those things are, you know, what we call “big bangs,” and sometimes they’re big bangs that actually happen in the wrong universe. So they’re widely popular, but it doesn’t always translate into sales.
DIANE SAWYER
(Voice Over) So, prepare yourself for the future where no space will be safe.
graphics: your ad here
DIANE SAWYER
(Off Camera) Got two eye lids to rent out, I don’t know about you. A little batting around here, a little pocket change. Anyway, coming up next, the shrinking entree, how about an inch of pizza when you’re on a diet. Restaurants ...
ROBIN ROBERTS, ABC NEWS
(Voice Over) That’s it?
DIANE SAWYER
(Voice Over) ... say, yeah, a thimble full of beer. Hey, let’s hear what restaurants are starting to do.
commercial break