"MOMENT OF TRUTH"
Excerpts from the front page of The Wall Street Journal
In a Shift, Marketers Beef Up Ad Spending Inside Stores
By EMILY NELSON and SARAH ELLISON
Staff Reporters
September 21, 2005; Page A1
Procter & Gamble Co. believes shoppers make up their mind about a product in about the time it takes to read this paragraph.
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This “first moment of truth,” as P&G calls it, is the three to seven seconds when someone notices an item…
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P&G’s insight is helping to power a shift in the advertising business: the growth and increasing sophistication of in-store marketing. Almost a century ago, P&G popularized the concept of mass-market advertising. Now, in response to the fragmentation of television and print ads, it wants to tout its brands directly to consumers where they’re most likely to be influenced: the store.
Veronis Suhler Stevenson Partners LLC, an investment bank that produces forecasts for the communications industry, says companies in the U.S. are expected to spend about $18.6 billion on in-store marketing and in-store ads this year, up from $17.6 billion last year.
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One vehicle that’s helping change this traditionally mundane advertising medium is Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s in-store TV network. It is seen by 130 million shoppers a month, according to ratings data produced by Nielsen Media Research for San Francisco-based PRN Corp., which runs the network. Through it, Wal-Mart has, in effect, recreated the mass audience that marketers used to easily reach on network TV.
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The growth of in-store marketing has made ad agencies’ lives more complicated. For starters, ad agencies now have more than one master to please: the client and the retailer. Even after a retailer agrees to a newfangled in-store display, it often fall to individual store managers to install them or, in some chains, make sure the television is on at the right time; they aren’t always good at complying.