Orland Evangelical Free Church | New York Times Readers and Advertising

On Monday Louise Story's piece, "Anywhere the Eye Can See, It's Likely To See an Ad", made the Times most e-mailed list for a day. Interest in the article may reflect how many Times readers are in the business of public relations, or it may express the irritability of a public besieged by salesmen. It portrays the minute level to which marketing has to descend in order to send messages to consumers. Think eggs.

I believe inside many evangelical pastors is a marketing executive yearning to be free. They have to spend their time dreaming up ways to lure people into the Bible, and they become skilled - or they don't survive.

So there has long been an obsession among evangelicals with advertising. The "I Found It!" campaign was the first evangelical attempt I can remember to use mainstream marketing to spread the gospel: there were billboards with people smiling at you, there were buttons with the slogan on it, there were posters, all printed on a solid blue background. Everything begged you to ask, "Whadja find?"

My memory is that the campaign blew through our church and had no discernable impact.

Impact is getting harder to achieve. "Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 today." I don't even want to know the per-minute number. The firm surveyed 4,110 people about marketing, half of whom thought it was "out of control."

Money is a good measure. In 2000, advertisers spent $24 million on something called "alternative media". Last year the figure was $387 million. So what is all this money paying for?

Messages on subway turnstiles, Chinese food cartons, motion sickness bags, airport security trays, the paper liners of examination tables in doctors' offices, and tray tables on planes. Also radio ads on school buses, aroma-emitting displays at bus stops, digital screens that replace old fashioned billboards, projections onto buildings and sidewalks, interactive floor displays, product placement in TV shows and movies, video screens in taxicabs, shirt boxes and hanging bags from dry cleaners, and . . . stamped supermarket eggs.

One ad executive says, "We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to be everywhere. Ubiquity is the new exclusivity."

The problem is the average person sees advertising as annoying, invasive, and disrespectful. Overt marketing is no longer a credible source of information.

But somewhere, some pastor read this article and thought, "We should be as smart as the marketing people. We should make the gospel ubiquitous. We could put the "I Found It!" slogan on airline tray tables, project it on buildings around town, print it on blue examination table liners. We could stamp it on eggs!"

Two ironies are inescapable.

Evangelicals have a knack for riding waves that broke years before. Advertising lost its mystique and became a joke decades ago, and now the field of marketing struggles to stay fresh. Yet churches are watchful for the next advertising bonanza, like The Passion of the Christ.

But more painful is the reality that followers of Christ should already have that quality advertisers pay so much to attain: ubiquity. How does it happen that evangelicals are in every neighborhood, every profession and social stratum, yet the message of their lives dissolves into the culture?