All clutter, all the time, everywhere

Everybody knows about advertising “clutter” — the proliferation of commercial persuasion messages through every conceivable medium. Consumers don’t like it for obvious reasons, but ad pros don’t like it easier: The more messages there are, the harder for theirs to get through, etc.

Consumer-in-control rhetoric aside, the evolutions of the media landscape have done nothing to reduce clutter. (Obviously this is dealt with in more detail in Buying In.) In fact the various technological advances described as empowering the consumer invariably inspire, or simply succumb to, more forms of marketing.

This is because, generally speaking, when commercial persuaders fight clutter, they way they do it is by creating more clutter. A recent Adweek piece is instructive on this score. It’s titled “The Clutter Busters.”

Stephen Quinn, CMO of Wal-Mart Stores U.S., says that the only clutter-proof medium he’s aware of is the one that the company created itself, the Walmart Smart Network….

When it’s fully rolled out next year, it will include some 27,000 in-store video screens in 2,700 stores. The content includes both infomercials and advertisements from Wal-Mart suppliers, and the schedules are customized to individual stores and shopping occasions.

Well, that’s a “clutter-proof medium” only in the sense that no unsanctioned brand can interfere with the messaging of Wal-Mart and its suppliers. From a consumer point of view the medium of an in-store shopping network, blasting infomercials and ads while you shop, is, in point of fact, an all-clutter medium.

And that’s what most of the examples in the piece seem to be: Media or content that is completely controlled by a single brand, thereby eliminating the “clutter” of other brands. (In Wal-Mart’s case, that also means a network of “select female bloggers” who will provide “tips” on Wal-Mart’s site, and its YouTube channel.)

Another way to distance a brand from traditional clutter is that increasingly popular murketing form: Inserting your brand directly in the entertainment, away from the (skippable) ads for other companies’ products. A new daytime talkshow, for instance, will have host Bonnie Hunt doing a beauty segment involving “Walgreens integrations.” Not just using Walgreens products but “actually shopping in our stores… with our beauty advisers,” a Walgreens exec explains.

That’s clutter-busting? Maybe to brand managers. But not to the rest of us.