The seeds of reverse advertising were sown way back in the days of analogue television and dial up internet by cutting edge practitioners like K-Tel and and Demtel - whose trademark set of free steak knives were early indicators of the genius that was to follow. Acres of warehouse space were filled with unsellable products and insolvency trustees and administrators kept in profitable employment by the work of these early pioneers; annoying people so much that they wouldn't buy the product at gunpoint.
The development of broadband internet and the Beer Humour school of advertising took these entrepreneurs by surprise and the development of reverse advertising was put on hold for a decade while people actually made money through attracting people with advertising.
However, this school of thought was doomed to failure as soon as the clients for these companies realised that the joke was only going to be funny a dozen or so times and then they were going to have to make another expensive ad.
At the same time, the noise in the advertising market rose to such a pitch as to drown out all other ways of selling a product. In this new jungle, only the Howler Monkeys survived and the early work in Reverse Advertising was re-discovered by a new generation of young Turks and pitched to a new batch of presumably insane clients.
And a fertile environment they found for their wares. The advent of in-app advertising was heaven sent for the Reversers and they wasted no time in filling up the gaming experience of every person on the planet with dull ads repeated every time the player had another go at getting three stars on an Angry Birds level.
Keeping up with technology, the Reversers have gotten into the ear of Google and introduced the unskippable 15 second ad on YouTube. There is no way known that a person, forced to watch 15 seconds of ever to be repeated new car runout deals, is going to run out and do anything other than set fire to the dealership. Whole movements have sprung up under the banner of 5SS (Five Seconds then Skip) to help consumers boycott products who unethically take up time advertising during pirated movie content. The Reversers are rejoicing because they have finally found a way to get people talking about their clients' products.
While try-hard copy-cats are providing cut-price, over-hyphenated versions of the same idea by selling mass emailing and SMS campaigns to clients at the holes-in-my-socks end of the market, the diamond standard PR firms have successfully re-engineered whole business models around Reverse Advertising. Whereas in the days of Demtel, dodgy hair straighteners, vacuum cleaners, exercise products and nose trimmers were only available if you called in the next thirty minutes, these days purveyors of such tripe not only pay to annoy you to death but also pay to name the leading retailers at whose emporia you can studiously avoid purchasing their products. It's award winning marketing genius at its best.
In a time when the Australian economy is likely to drop down the sinkhole of the mining industry at any moment, it's wonderful to see that our diggers are ever ready to succeed against impossible odds and make good money from annoying the crap out of people.
Notes:
The two beer ads mentioned above are both for Carlton Draught and are
Canoes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptGf4sGv2EE
Big Ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6uJlI-t14
"Diggers" is an Australian term for soldiers.
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