When Ads Subtract

By Jeffrey Kluger

A major television network bought advertising space on a banana I recently ate. This is not a sentence I've had a chance to say often in my life, so I'm going to repeat it: A major television network bought advertising space on a banana I recently ate.

Since the executives at the network--it was ABC, by the way--spent good money for their ad, I figure I should tell them something about the demographics of their one-person target audience. I'm part of the 35-to-50 age group--part of the far smaller age group that turned 44 last May 21, if you must know. I'm currently single, though I'm getting married in December, so my household income should increase considerably. I earn...well, even ABC doesn't need to know what I earn, but if you're looking for a consumer with a little disposable jack to throw around, I'm your man.

Now, let me mention something about the banana. It was--How best to put this?--an unfortunate banana. Small, spotty and bruised--not at all the best environment, as the Madison Avenue folks say, for any ad. But when you're advertising on fruit, you're bound to get the occasional lemon.

I should say that no matter what kind of food carried the unusual ad, in no event am I the best audience for any promotion from ABC. I gave up on Good Morning America even before Joan and Charlie left, and now, well, suffice it to say I get out of the house a lot earlier than I used to. I can't say I really care for Dharma, and I don't know what Greg sees in her either. If it weren't for Monday Night Football, I'd be short one network altogether.

So I'm telling the truth when I say I was not pleased that the off-yellow banana I bought last week bore a bright yellow sticker bearing the ABC logo along with the ostensibly ironic legend TV. ZERO CALORIES. I'm no food purist, and I know bananas are supposed to have stickers. But they're supposed to say chiquita, and that makes sense. Chiquita produces bananas. ABC produces the pasty mashed potato that is Dharma & Greg.

It is not ABC alone that is finding increasingly intrusive ways to get its ads into the faces of an already ad-weary public. But in the past few years, it seems, the endgame, the D-day, the final storming of the last untrademarked beaches has begun. The opening shot was fired in the nation's sports stadiums.

Traditionally, stadium names range from the banal (Memorial Stadium) to the picturesque (Candlestick Park) to the fall-down-weeping-in-the-face-of-true-nomenclatural-greatness (the Polo Grounds). What stadium names haven't been is brand names. But that's changed. San Diego's Jack Murphy Stadium has become Qualcomm Stadium, which is either a communications company or a powerful nighttime cold medicine, depending on whom you ask. The Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis is now the RCA Dome, which no doubt annoyed the city's pilfered Baltimore Colts, who had already changed their letterhead once and would probably prefer not to do it again.

I know, I know--this kind of thing has long been part of the sports world. Busch Stadium is a fixture in St. Louis; Coors Stadium is thriving in Denver. But those names are pushing beers, and when it comes to beer and sports, the connection is so primally made that I can't get worked up over it. And don't talk to me about Wrigley Field, either. That was the man's name, after all. Call the place Juicy Fruit Park, and then I'll worry.

What started in the stadiums is creeping into your cash machine. Four Chicago banks are experimenting with filling those few seconds while a transaction is being processed--seconds, you might argue, that don't strictly need filling--with onscreen commercial loops. Will they influence your purchasing decisions? Perhaps. But how likely would you be to buy a product when your ATM erases any record of your deposit because it's paying more attention to showing you a dreamy, slo-mo image of a new car slaloming through racing cones than it is to processing your transaction?

None of this, of course, is entirely new. Advertising, like kudzu, has always existed opportunistically, moving unchecked through the cultural biomass until it finds a niche, then setting down roots. It long ago took hold on such improbable places as the fenders of racing cars and the insides of matchbook covers. The fact that logos and promotions now bloom on the uniforms of professional athletes, in the blinking screens of Internet data and even on the skin of the sad banana ought to be no surprise.

The danger for the people who promote all the products is that advertising runs the risk of overrunning its environment. Like animals who graze their savannas to stubble and humans who fill their cities to bursting, ads may simply exhaust the very resource that keeps them alive. That resource, in this case, is the goodwill of consumers. As any endangered animal can attest, what follows is extinction. For the dodo, that's a tragedy. For the banana sticker, it would be another thing entirely.