Ambient Media: A New Advertising Term
Ambient media is a relatively new term in advertising and is attributed to the United Kingdom in original. It refers to non-traditional forms of advertising (also called alternative advertising) approaches. Ambient media includes, but is not limited to, billboards (also called outdoor advertising), ads on grocery carts or shopping receipts, point of purchase displays in stores, advertising specialties and more. Its purpose is to reinforce other advertising messages, or reach an audience in a surprising, or unusual way, when the audience doesn’t expect to receive an ad message.
Advertising agencies are often in the business of helping the advertiser to build top of mind awareness, or top of mind recall. These terms refer to the audiences’ exposure to ad messages, over and over, until the first product they think of, when their need arises, is the product they’ve been exposed to continually through advertising exposure.
Top of mind awareness, or recall, is the goal of repeated advertising. If you think of a soft drink, what’s the first product that comes to your mind? If you think of a tissue product, what’s the first product that comes to mind? The products you think of immediately, those that pop into your head, or the jingle you find yourself singing (whether you want to or not), are the result of top of mind awareness advertising.
Ambient media supports traditional advertising through exposure to the audience to aid in top of mind awareness. If the audience for a product sees an ad on television, hears an ad on the radio, then goes to a store and sees a point of purchase display, they just might buy the product. If traditional forms of advertising are used, and the audience sees ads for the same product on the side of a bus, or on a bus stop bench, and sees the product logo broadcast on the side of a building in lights, or in a window display, or on a hot air balloon, they have had the same image reinforced over and over, and when the time comes, they’ll recall this product and perhaps purchase it.
Sales of ambient media are used more and more often in today’s marketplaces, where buyers are influenced by every available means. The internet is one of the most commonly used methods of ambient media, where ads are posted on popular websites that receive a lot of traffic and reach the right audience for the advertiser. Some large advertisers purchase space on multiple websites because the product has broader appeal than a single market segment, and they wish to reach the masses. The purpose of these ads is to gain immediate response, but also to build top of mind awareness if no need exists with the buyer yet.
Even though these are non-traditional forms of advertising, they can be very effective in reinforcing traditional advertising campaigns, and enhancing them, or used as an alternative to traditional advertising practices and methods.
