How to reach out to attention-deficit consumers that live a time-deficit life?

I remember that growing up in Turkey I used to enjoy watching TV commercials, recording the best ones and talking about them with my friends. Especially American commercials were the coolest; such as Coke and Levis 501 commercials. I don’t remember when the last time I saw a great commercial on TV and I know that people today don’t watch commercials; they hear them in the background. And most of us click away from ads online. So, how to reach out to attention-deficit consumers that live a time-deficit life?

In his article, “Attention-Deficit Advertising” on Business Week, Burt Helm presented several creative ways in which companies leverage social networking and texting phenomena to reach out to their target audiences. For example, during the Final Four weekend of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, the Chicago-based mobile ad firm Vibes Media displayed viewers' text messages on screens above and next to the stage. As fans text messaged to folks in their networks, prominent AT&T (T) or Coca-Cola (KO) logos appeared on the top of the messages. Helm writes some 5,000 people sent in 11,000 messages, according to Vibes. The same firm has been offering bar goers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta the platform to send text messages to the TV screens at their local watering holes. Again the same concept here, text messages on the screen appear along with Bud Lights ads. Helm examines in his article how “Converse (NKE) created an application on Facebook that allows people to sign up friends to play an online basketball game.” According to Converse, this application now has more than 40,000 people to add to its database of potential customers.

Also noteworthy that Google now is threatened by the ever-growing number of people googling on their wireless devices. “The real threat to Google” by Ben Kunz on Business Week, indicates that Google “must cope with less space to place ads.” Simply because “Google makes money selling ad inventory. And its ad inventory is diminished on a cell phone.”

Here is the message to companies targeting consumers: “If you can’t reach me on my cell, you are not catching me. And don’t you ever dare to cold call me. Get creative.”