Dear Tig Below-the-Line Redux, “Free” Content, and Is E-Survivor in the Offing?

** Tig's weekly column fields questions from and for marketers. Got a question for Tig? Email him by clicking here. **

Dear Reader,

The person who originally asked the about the origin of the term “below-the-line advertising” may be horrified to know that in the last week, hundreds of billable hours have been thrown to waste.

Ad executives across three continents have been emailing me leads, bits of etymological trivia, and outright unsupported fanciful theories about the issue. (I now think, despite rigorous protections, there may actually be some people in the creative departments subscribing to this newsletter.)

Much was made of the potential relation to the Plimsoll line--a boat engineering term referring to the level to which a boat may be loaded before it might sink. Just precisely how direct marketing might be considered below that line versus above it isn't quite clear to me, or apparently to the folks emailing in.

This strikes me as an inapt origin for the term, as any weight placed above or below that line on a ship will have the same effect. For instance, if you put one more Scud missile hidden under bags of concrete in the hold of a North Korean ship loaded to the Plimsoll line headed to Yemen, it will have the same effect as if you placed it gently on the upper deck.

(In both cases, Spain would intercept it briefly before letting the missiles go on their merry way to the sunny dictatorship.)

It seems that many of the responses functioned as a Rorschach test, allowing readers to see things that related to their own industries. One Los Angeles production company employee thought the term may come from the credits listed on advertisements for movies. There was literally a line separating the top talent from the lesser names, which strikes me as a very fair--if completely speculative--theory as to the term's origin.

A person who worked for Coke pointed out that in Coke's marketing budgets, a line was drawn between the more broadcast-oriented media and the more promotional media, partly to delineate which would be paid for by the corporation, and which would be the responsibility of the local market bottler.

Perhaps the best and most likely origin was sent in from an old agency hand. In the early days, he said, billing documents and billing systems referred only to commissioned media. When types of media came about that didn't involve agency commissions, new parts of the billing statements needed to be added on, usually done manually with a line drawn between the parts. The fact that non-commission media were necessarily below this line makes this explanation the one with the best correlation.

-Tig

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Dear Tig,

I'm a one-woman marketing show responsible for manufacturing industry e-newsletters. I often struggle to come up with useful, relevant content.

Where does the law stand on referencing other sources/articles in my publication? For example, if I cite the source, do I also need to request permission from the author and/or the publication the info came from? I want to be sure I'm doing everything above board.

Thanks! Recycler

Dear Recycler,

My impression is that you can cite material (as in refer to it) without permission. You can even review it, give capsule condensed versions, etc. (so long as you're not copying the actual words), also without permission.

To reprint anything but a very small portion, though, you'd need permission. This is true for publishing generally. But oddly, commercial speech is considered slightly different.

Using copyrighted material in an advertisement, for instance, requires a higher level of permission, partly because you give the impression that the original author endorses the advertised product.

In my opinion, this separate status for commercial speech has been taken a little too far. Once the judges started separating out marketing communications from the herd, it became quite vulnerable, and we've found over the past few decades that more and more commercial speech applications are limited where the non-commercial speech is not.

This is unhealthy, both because it creates a slippery slope of potential speech rights infringements and because it creates a gray area of the definition of commercial speech versus non-commercial speech.

For instance, does a newsletter that serves as a client retention advertisement fall under the commercial speech category? If in doubt, the general rule is to ask.

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Dear Tig,

The increased use of reality shows on television is horrible. I know the production is relatively cheap, but so is the value of the content. Is this the direction in which other media are headed? Would such content be useful to advertisers?

Fretting in Frankfurt

Dear Fretful,

We need not worry in the online environment, certainly. I think any reading-based medium is a bit safer.

I'm trying to imagine just how a reality show could work online, but I just keep coming up with a transcript of 20 people emailing each other. I don't care who they are, the series would be stultifying--the majority of messages being scheduling queries, parents asking for computer help, mass mailings of silly joke lists, catty comments and the occasional Spam message inviting the recipient to participate in Nigerian government fraud.

When we take out the excessive use of large chests and unemployed models, the “content” of their interaction begins to look a little slim.

To put it mildly, reality-show audiences tend to index poorly in the rocket scientist department. Advertisers may indeed find the audiences very useful in the same sort of way they've found useful the soap operas that have run for decades in daytime programming. Those audiences are useful because they're cheap, and cheap gross rating points is the overriding priority for certain product categories.

After the newness of the fad wears off, and Generation Y media planners have more and more difficulty justifying their purchases, the reality trend will fade. I doubt serious inroads could be made in a word-based medium.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tig Tillinghast tiggy@mac.com writes from the banks of the Elk River near Chesapeake City, Maryland. He consults with major brands and ad agency holding companies, helping marketing groups find the right resources for their needs. He is the author of The Tactical Guide to Online Marketing as well as several terrible fiction manuscripts.

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