Nearing his destination, he stops to order his first drink in years. The mail brings an unsolicited publication called The Journal of Longevity. No, it's an advertising piece for a company selling nutrition supplements. These schemes offer certain advantages to marketers, but certain pitfalls for consumers. Siva Balasubramanian, an SIUC professor of marketing , coined the term hybrid message.
Hybrids are commercial messages masquerading as noncommercial forms of communication.
Defined as any TV commercial longer than two minutes, most are 30-minute spots. Ditto The Journal of Longevity . Hybrid messages aren't new, but they didn't become big business until the past 20 years or so. Infomercials first aired in the 1950s, caught flak in the late 1960s for focusing on children's products, and all but vanished when the Federal Communications Commission acted in 1974 to limit advertising time on networks. Waiting in the wings was a whole industry ready to take off.