In 1976, Tom Waits released his classic song “Step Right Up”, a hilarious rant on the state of advertising. It’s an anthem to all the bad marketing clichés of the time with lyrics about “year-end clearances” and “50% off” messages jockeying for attention.
He closes with a line that inspired this cartoon:
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”
Advertising clutter may look and and sound a little different nearly 50 years later, but the song still captures the noise level of the attention economy.
Jean-Paul Edwards, managing director at OMD Worldwide, recently observed:
“We’ve passed peak clutter in terms of as many ads as possible on a page. But clutter manifests in other ways now: far more types of channels; consuming more channels at once; far more inputs going on; and far more advertisers out there.
“20 years ago, broadcaster ITV maybe only had three to four thousand advertisers a year; now Facebook claims it’s got 10 million.”
Today’s advertising arms race may be hyper-personalized, data-driven, and AI-powered, but it’s the same old war for attention. “Stop the scroll” is the new “step right up.”
That continually raises the bar on what marketers try to do to get noticed.
I like this wisdom from Seth Godin:
“You’re trying to get through all the noise and the distraction and the clutter with your message.
“Here’s the thing: You are the noise and the distraction and the clutter.
“Just because it’s important to you doesn’t mean it’s important to us.
“It is, of course, in the eye of the beholder.
“Instead of creating an ad campaign that somehow cuts and invades, consider creating a product, a service and a story that we’d miss if we couldn’t find it.”
We can’t break through the clutter by adding to it.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
