I am absolutely flummoxed at how deep the media channels flow in the USA.
I’ve never such visual pollution in one city. So much advertising.The thing I’m most surprised about is the ethical (pun intended) pharmaceutical category. TV advertisements for Drug X, encouraging people to go to the doctor to see if they have disease Y, in which case they should ask the doctor to prescribe drug X. This is so wrong, on so many levels. Start ups out there, please be in business for good – sales should be your secondary objective – helping people your first.
Sure, Times Square is kind of cool to look at, a real visual orgy. But it just never ends.
If you’re in the media business in Australia or Europe, there are plenty of new spaces which can be leveraged. I’ll provide a summary of new media channels with a photo essay at the end of the trip. But in the interim here’s a link to an historical advertising photo stream I found on flickr. Quite interesting.
You make an excellent point and I’m glad you pointed that out. Too many ads contain mind tricks and we live in a world based on fear and if we fear something, we will do whatever we think will make it go away. The fear of being sick is a huge one, which causes more people to take unnecessary medicine which in turn creates more sicknesses and more fear. Its a terrible cycle that originates with our form of media. This is not going to stop and it only gets worse. People need to learn not to listen.
I believe that it comes down to branding more then advertising. For the most part i would imagine many new yorkers would barely see much of the advertising in Times Square they know it is there but, it is part of their daily grind.
As such i would expect much of the advertising is there more because people are allowing it and the big companies that can afford the ad space pay for it because if they dont someone else will and they do not want to lose that space.