Intrusive Advertising & Urban Spam

One of the points many of the Trend presenters made at the Future Marketing Summit last month in New York was how instrusive and desperate advertising was becoming. Treehugger’s Graham Hill criticised advertising in sand at the beach and stairways plastered with ads. Russell Davies notes the ‘urban spam’ he gets when he buys a cup of coffee – “We got given this cup and ‘to-go sleeve’ at Coffee Republic. It’s got a rubbish Motorola ad on it,” he says.

It’s something that us ‘ad blogs’ have to remember. We have a responsibility to encourage valuable dialog between brands and the consumer. Too often, ad blogs are too keen to parade the latest intrusive marketing campaign (normally from Brazil). Shouldn’t we be analyzing the state of an industry that supports the use of lamp-post poles (in public spaces) as ads for strip-bars, rather than praising the idea?