Advertising does not work like it used to for two reasons:
1.) Technology The internet has trained us to quickly avoid hype as we access only the information and entertainment we want. Consumers who used to absorb TV commercials that interrupted their favorite shows now have remote controls or digital recorders to help them skip past these messages. People who used to get their weather forecasts in the morning paper now get up to the minute weather from radio, TV or on-line.
2.) Fragmentation Consumers now face fragmentation on two fronts; they have more places to buy from, and more media promoting those places. Depending on which surveys you believe, we are now exposed to somewhere between 2,500 and 5,600 advertising messages per day, including packaging, signage, radio, TV, internet, print and more.
The Bad News In a world bombarded by ads and commercials, your customers have learned to filter out hyper-communications with their mental B.S. Meters. In a less fragmented competitive environment and before the internet, advertisers succeeded by simply keeping their names in front of the public. Today there are too many names and too many places to expose those names, for simple name recognition to work.
The Good News People are still buying! In a world of shouting, clutter, and hype, relevant and meaningful messages are working better than ever!