Bernard Gauthier

There is much ado about ad clutter these days. The editors of Advertising Age have been reporting breathlessly on how the increasing number of ads to which each of us is exposed is bringing about a constant decline in the return on investment for very expensive mass advertising campaigns. It is a problem and it is forcing many to rethink mass advertising entirely (all to the good) but the phenomenon is anything but new.

As early as 1903 (in The Theory of Advertising), business psychologist Walter Dill Scott was writing about the need to secure the attention of the newspaper or magazine reader amid pages full of competing advertisements. “That a thing may attract our attention,” advised Scott, “it must not affect us indifferently, but must either please us or displease us… In the ideal advertisement, the emotions and sensibilities of the possible customers must be appealed to” (p. 29).

Some 20 years later, Daniel Starch (also a psychologist with a keen interest in advertising) began developing a battery of tests to determine which of the ads in cluttered publications were able to secure and hold the attention of the audience long enough to register in their memory. Those tests still bear his name and earned him a place in Advertising Age’s list of the 100 most influential people in the 100 year history of modern advertising. Some 80 years ago then, the challenge of clutter in advertising was already causing lost sleep to those funding and creating ad campaigns. Starch’s solutions included now commonplace elements of advertising like large headlines, dramatic visuals and repetition of the brand name. His research showed that they work, so the approach stuck.

The concern over clutter reached another frenzied pitch in the post-war boom as television commercials joined print and radio to generate unprecedented clutter. There were far fewer stations and fewer commercials but clutter anxiety was alive and well. “We have less time to read, browse, meditate and muse,” lamented Margot Sherman of the McCann-Erickson Agency (as told in Stephen Fox’s excellent history of American advertising, The Mirror Makers). “There is such a multiplicity of messages striking us from every side… that it seems sometimes that the lightning message of a picture can strike deep and hit home when we have a moment to spare” (p. 179). The solution, for modern advertisers like Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates agency was to simplify, streamline and repeat, repeat, repeat a single, simple claim – the ever-relevant USP approach.

So the challenge of ad clutter is not nearly new. Any glance at an old newspaper or magazine will tell you that, as will a casual listen to old time radio with its sponsor names woven into every nook and cranny of so-called programming. What is perhaps new this time out is the solution. Whereas Scott, Starch, Sherman and Reeves were content to simply shout louder and more effectively to rise above the clutter, there is a growing chorus of people who think it’s time to stop shouting altogether. Let’s talk and listen to a small, select audience instead. It’s sound advice (pardon the pun) that just might serve to bring people back into the marketplace – a good thing and the topic of a future posting.

In the meantime, consider that the three authors I mentioned above may indeed have had a good point to make. Ads that are well crafted and constructed can indeed rise above the clutter and draw our attention. Ads that are streamlined, that focus on original and salient points and that elicit some emotional response are the ones we remember and talk about, the ones we scour the web to download and pass along to our friends. It’s all those other ads that we ignore, despise and heap together into a big pile we call clutter. Then, as now, clutter was as much a problem with the quality of ads as it was a problem with their quantity.