If product advertising can be simply defined as the means by which you catch the customer’s attention and persuade them to choose your product rather than those of your competitors, then you’d be hard pressed to find a more effective form of advertising, particularly at point of sale, than attractive and effective labelling.
What’s more, with modern colour digital or inkjet label printing technology, the means to design and produce innovative and eye-catching product labelling is entirely in the hands of the manufacturer. Even smaller companies can now take control of costs and quality by using purpose designed and built label printing equipment from specialists such as QuickLabel Systems .
This allows smart manufacturers to take advantage of benefits such as reduced costs in outsourcing labelling supplies, additional flexibility of label production by producing labels in exactly the right quantities “just-in-time”, linking label production with the product production line as well as allowing changes to be made to labelling content almost at will.
Traditional ads in trouble?
The effectiveness of the product label in advertising was highlighted recently in a number of recent stories in the media, such as this clip on the BBC’s website, indicating that the growth of digital TV and programmes “on demand” has given TV advertising something of a headache.
With traditional TV, while many of us would routinely switch off metaphorically from the ad man’s message, it’s now increasingly possible to switch off and by-pass the adverts for real. Saving programmes for future viewing using digital smart TV’s allows the viewer to simply skip through the unwanted interruption of the three minute ad break.
The resulting fall off in effectiveness of traditional TV advertising has meant an unwelcome fall in advertising revenue for commercial TV companies. It’s also caused a sharp rise in demand, and hence price premium, for advertising around big live sport events. By their very nature, viewers tend to watch these as they’re transmitted rather than via their TV’s digital player – and consequently there’s less opportunity to escape the adverts. Ever wondered why broadcasters schedule a half hour build up to the big match? Clue – it’s not to allow you to experience the dubious benefit of half an hour of expert and insightful TV punditry!
The solution?
Thinking out of the box, advertisers (and TV Execs) are turning more to the once-derided ploy of product placement – the prominent display of the sponsor’s product, with printed colour labelling to the fore, naturally, during the programme itself. Here, however, instead of being part of the problem, digital technology comes to the ad man’s rescue as part of the solution.
It’s a fairly easy process, given modern digital technology, to add the product, printed labelling and all, post production. This has a couple of important advantages for the advertiser. It means, for example, that the TV Company can sell the screen time more than once to different advertisers. It also allows the product being advertised to be changed depending on where, or even when, the programme is being aired. And because the “advertisement” is embedded in the programme itself, not to mention being assimilated almost subliminally be the target audience, it’s extremely effective
Yet for the maximum effect, we come back almost to first principals – the thing that really grabs the customer’s attention, now as always, is attractive, eye-catching product label printing.
Kidal Delonix is a contributor to Mr. Hoffman's blog. The views and opinions are entirely his/her own and may not reflect Mr Hoffman's views.
