July 20, 2006

Urban Spam, Our Thoughts

by Piers Fawkes in End Of In-Between, Lifestyle, Architecture, Advertising & Branding

We wanted to give you some background to the little video we published yesterday on YouTube.

We first started to become aware of a concern of a growing interference by advertisers in our personal space when we watched Graham Hill of Treehugger present at the Future Marketing Summit in NYC in February. Graham talked about the ‘End Of Inbetween’ at the FMS as a negative trend and covered the rise of omnipresence in marketing messages.

A couple of months later, British marketing guru Russell Davies started using the term ‘Urban Spam’ on his blog. We haven’t asked Russell where he got the term from - but we remember a specific post where he questioned why an ad had to be wrapped around his morning coffee. He has a special category now for posts on his blog about Urban Spam.

So, from that point on, we monitored this concept of outdoor interruption that the ad industry seems to think so sexy. Don’t get us wrong - right time, right place, relevant message - it works a treat and people ‘get it’ and appreciate it.

But there seems to be an opposing view with the public & press to that of the advertising industry. Two weeks ago New York’s AM Newspaper complained about the rise of Advertecture and this has been echoed in the blogs for a while.

On the PSFK tour of ad agencies, we felt execs were a little unaware by the trend when we presented the idea of ‘The End Of Inbetween’ . Last week on the tour, Martin at SS+K asked if the ad industry realized that this was a growing feeling - and although we wanted to say yes, the answer was no.

So the film is our wave of the flag. A warning. It’s something we hope will start a conversation, a discussion, a debate, better advertising.

7 Responses to “Urban Spam, Our Thoughts”

Samuel
Posted from: 222.212.91.14
July 21st, 2006 at 2:03 am

So the film is our wave of the flag. A warning. It’s something we hope will start a conversation, a discussion, a debate, better advertising.

I think so!!
Piers Fawkes
Posted from: 151.205.165.141
July 21st, 2006 at 12:30 pm

Thanks!
Polkadotholes
Posted from: 204.9.178.8
July 24th, 2006 at 2:52 am

Tesco go back to the old school

Since the poor performance of Tesco TV, it appears that Tesco have gone back to basic and are allowing standard ad space inside their stores. I saw these Lucozade boards in a Tesco Metro at the weekend. They were positioned
cubemate
Posted from: 204.9.178.8
July 24th, 2006 at 7:46 am

PSFK off

Piers Fawkes writes in Urban Spam, Our Thoughts that there is a new scourge upon us - coined by Russell Davies - of ‘Urban Spam’. The problem is, of course, that the phenomenon of outdoor advertising is not new, and
cubemate
Posted from: 204.9.178.8
July 24th, 2006 at 7:56 am

PSFK off outdoor advertising

Piers Fawkes writes in Urban Spam, Our Thoughts that there is a new scourge upon us - coined by Russell Davies - of ‘Urban Spam’. The problem is, of course, that the phenomenon of outdoor advertising is not new, and
cubemate
Posted from: 204.9.178.8
July 25th, 2006 at 10:57 pm

PSFK off outdoor advertising

Piers Fawkes writes in Urban Spam, Our Thoughts that there is a new scourge upon us - coined by Russell Davies - of ‘Urban Spam’. The problem is, of course, that the phenomenon of outdoor advertising is not new, and
do.palicio.us /blog » Yesterday's Tomorrow x The Future of Advertising
Posted from: 205.196.222.11
August 28th, 2007 at 2:04 pm

[…] Talk about clutter… Piers and PSFK have done a great job calling out urban spam, and this video animation highlights the amount of commercial stimuli we receive […]