[Test marketing ad, Telco-client, 1997]

...I can take my tool, a hammer say, and build a chair with it. Nice service. That helps people. Or, I can take my tool, my hammer, and bash someone's kneecaps with it.... The insults to psyche and the resulting overload stands to soon tilt things on their axis. It must. Turbocharged entropy will do that to systems. They get manic. They generate shrapnel.

Hmmm. Looks like Ad Age, of all people, has been pondering "shrapnel":

Why Public Sentiment Is Rising Against Relentlessly Intrusive Marketing

According to a new Yankelovich Partners poll, 65% of Americans say they are "constantly bombarded with too much" advertising; 61% think the quantity of advertising and marketing they are exposed to "is out of control"; 60% report that their view of advertising is "much more negative than just a few years ago."

Popular protests

Responding to sports fans' disgust over the sale of naming rights, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors restored the name Candlestick Park to its baseball stadium, which became the first pro sports arena to return to its popular name because of popular protest. In Denver, Mayor John Hickenlooper rose to prominence as the lead opponent to the sale of naming rights to Mile High Stadium. The placement of ads on pro baseball uniforms and batting helmets drew a spate of negative news coverage this month, a letter from a U.S. senator and a New York Times editorial.

Advertisers are being expelled from schools in droves. Channel One, the in-school advertising service, was removed last school year from Nashville, and will soon be kicked out of Seattle. New restrictions on the marketing or sale of soda or junk food in school have been approved in places such as California, Texas, New York City and Philadelphia.

Formidable opponents

These are just a few flashpoints. I could list many more. The point is that the advertising industry is growing a formidable list of opponents. It would do the industry some good to ponder why this is happening. The main reason, I suspect, is that the industry abides no limits or boundaries. There seems to be almost nowhere that the industry won't stick an ad...

Lack of respect

The industry's implicit message is a total lack of respect for our time, our privacy, our attention, our peace of mind, and not least for our concerns about our kids. "Your attention is ours," the industry says, in effect. "We are entitled to it at every moment." This implicit disrespect for consumers is starting to overwhelm the explicit messages that each advertiser is trying to get across.

The industry's disrespect is obvious in the spread of coercive advertising. If advertising were popular, why would the industry force us to watch it? But it does; the industry takes advantage of captive audiences in schools, colleges, movie theaters, airport lounges, mass transit and at ATMs, gas pumps and doctors' offices, among other places...

Good and sensible article, from a business and a public policy angle: if advertising doesn't stop throwing spaghetti at the wall, they're gonna be forced to behave. As noted above, turbocharged entropy, borne of desperation. A lack of original thinking and a cost benefit analysis leaving consumers transparently on the short end shows that a business built on winning friends and loyalty is has been seriously upside down. Another case of numbers winning over sensing. Too bad.

[update: Looks like Johnnie Moore has been noodling the Yankelovich Study and "Reciprocity"...

I don't want to live in a world of mere transactional efficiency. When I go to a shop I don't want the staff merely to cow tow in an effort to make my life fractionally more efficient. I don't want every communication I receive to conform merely to some anxious guess as to what I might want to hear. I am willing to be suprised, provoked, and engaged... I don't expect to be placated. I don't expect to be treated with precision by a company as I'm not a cog in a machine but flesh and blood. I don't want to be the cause of unnecessary anxiety... I'd quite like to be treated as the fallible human being that I am, by others who are willing to admit some fallibility.

Yeah, me neither. Now, what's the metric that allows a pressured telemarketer to leave well enough alone before burning their bridges? What's the imperative that encourages a marketer to help me find solutions to my challenge, even if their product isn't it?