Billboards are like sea turtles

I recently learnt about sea turtles, what a fascinating creature. Did you know that they are almost always submerged in water? It is for this reason that they have developed an anaerobic system of respiration. Although they breathe air, under dire circumstances they may divert to anaerobic respiration for long periods of time. They quickly refill their lungs with a single explosive exhalation and rapid inhalation when surfacing to breathe.

The sea turtle pictured here is called the Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle. Beautiful!

My first time learning about this creature was on a tv documentary. They showed how the eggs are laid in the sand, on the ocean’s shore. Wikipedia states that:

The mature nesting female hauls herself onto the beach and finds suitable sand on which to create a nest. Using her hind flippers, she digs a circular hole 40 to 50 centimetres (16 to 20 in) deep. After the hole is dug, the female then starts filling the nest with a clutch of soft-shelled eggs one by one until she has deposited around 50 to 200 eggs, depending on the species. Some species have been reported to lay 250 eggs, such as the hawksbill. After laying, she re-fills the nest with sand, re-sculpting and smoothing the surface until it is relatively undetectable visually. The whole process takes thirty to sixty minutes. She then returns to the ocean, leaving the eggs untended.

Now this is not a simple process. Due to the physical design of the sea turtle, movement out of the water is not very fast. It sort of crawls to move forward, and digging the hole to lay the female’s eggs is also a slow process.

After all this effort, the mother returns to the ocean, not knowing how many of the eggs will survive. And it has been statistically proven that only a very small proportion of each hatch – usually .01% – succeed.

God has designed nature and the universe with perfection – we all agree on that. But if we had to apply this type of process to business, it would be akin to shooting in the dark.

I think that is what advertising is, particularly big spend advertising like billboards. Advertising is shooting in the dark. It’s like dumping a whole lot of money in a hole, and expecting about .01% success. And if you have the opinion that advertising for branding is a smart thing – its not. And Chet Holmes will agree with me on that.

How do you know how many people viewed that billboard? How do you know how many people purchased your product due to that billboard? Measurement = impossible.

Did you know that $220 billion is spent on unmeasured advertising every year – in the US alone?

There’s a saying that advertising is the price you pay for not being remarkable. I’m sure you’re remarkable. We all are. Or more accurately, we all can be remarkable – but it takes some work. Advertising is the easy way out.

I’ll leave you with words by Seth Godin on this topic: “Do you want to bet your future on a process [that of advertising] that’s getting less effective every day?”

Photo credit: Wikipedia