I spent about equal time this weekend watching college basketball and sitting through AT&T ads.
After about the 20th ad (so roughly midway through the first game I saw) I got to wondering how much AT&T spends on advertising and why they choose to annoy potential customers by running the SAME DAMED AD to roughly the same audience SEVERAL DOZEN TIMES.
(The same thing holds for Verizon Wireless, which also runs the same ads over and over and over and over and over. Verizon didn’t dominate the basketball like AT&T, but if I never see the network geek with the glasses again, it will still be too soon.)
I have yet to learn the value of repetition, but I did discover that AT&T spent about $2.24 billion on advertising last year and that most advertising insiders expect it to spend close to $2.5 billion this year.
I’m sure there’s some method to the madness, but I can’t see how its current advertising scheme can possibly help the company more than spending and extra $1 billion or so on better services — on top of the $17 billion or so it already spends on such things — and the remaining $1.24 billion on advertising.
I think I’d be just about as brand aware if I’d only seen 100 AT&T commercials this weekend.
I’m also prepared to throw my support behind any presidential candidate who promises a law that forbids TV stations from running the same ad twice in one broadcast.
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