Is it just me, or are adverts more irritating these days? All you want to do after a long day’s work is to come home, put your feet up, and relax by watching a little TV. But just when you’ve gotten comfy and begin to unwind, suddenly you’re assaulted with blasts of ‘GO COMPARE! GO COMPARE!’ and you know you just have to get up and go to the trouble of making yourself a brew, just to avoid the whole experience.

Sound familiar?

And it’s not just Go Compare. Thickly accented meerkats plague our screens; break-dancing newsreaders promise to buy our cars from us. Excitable people in coffee shops tell us that a computer system was their idea. Are you irritated yet?

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I have a question for you.   What do ‘Um Bongo’, ‘R Whites’ and ‘Shake n Vac’ have in common?  Well, if you’re an 80s child, like me, the answer will be obvious. The answer is each of these brands has had hugely memorable advertising jingles, which I’m sure you could probably hum along to even today.

Let’s try it.  All together now; “R Whites Lemonade, I’m a secret lemonade drinker, R Whites, R Whites”

Over the course of the years, I’m sure there can’t be a single person who can say that they haven’t had a marketing jingle stuck in their head.  I for one have been driven near mental by having Go Compare’s annoying tune implanted in my skull for days on end, but do they care?  Do they heck as like.

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If I had a pound for every time a client asked “Are we emailing our customers too much?” I would be a very rich man.  However, if I had a pound for every time a client asked if we were sending too much direct mail or are we broadcasting our TV or radio adverts too much then my bank balance would be no different.

Did the marketing team behind the infuriatingly more-ish Go Compare campaign debate whether their adverts were being shown too much during peak times?  I very much doubt it.  On New Years’ Eve 2008 did Pepsi worry that they were going a little over the top when they launched their new logo with a week-long ‘promotional extravaganza’ in Times Square.  Of course they didn’t.  So why do email marketers continually question their strategy when it comes to frequency and volume?

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