By: Jonathan Drew, Associated Press

May 28, 2006, Associated Press

NEW YORK -- As more television viewers skip commercials and print media readership declines, the battle to create novel advertisements has never been more intense. They're printed on the side of coffee cups, projected onto the sidewalk beneath your feet and stenciled onto the white lines that separate parking spaces.

Add to that list of unlikely commercial spaces: the stage.

Tuesday, the group charged with promoting tourism in London used live actors to pitch the city's attractions to theatergoers in New York. In what Visit London billed as the "world's first live commercial" -- at least it was when it was first performed in Europe -- five actors took the stage before a performance of "Stomp" to act out a three-minute sketch in which they discussed reasons to visit Britain's capital.

"If you look at a traditional travel and tourism promotion, they're done through travel pages in newspapers or travel magazines, and that's a very crowded marketplace," said Ken Kelling, a spokesman for Visit London.

A marketing professor said the age-old problem of getting customers to pay attention to ads has gotten dramatically worse.

"You get more and more media fragmentation. And you get more and more people with digital recorders that make it easier just to bypass the advertising entirely. So there's no question that people are looking for new ways to get the message across," said Tim Calkins, who teaches at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Branding, once reserved for detergents and soft drinks, has become increasingly important for cities and countries. Calkins said competition for business investment and tourism dollars has increased dramatically due to the increase of global trade and the ease of traveling abroad.

"The competition for a city like London is really all the other global cities that one can choose from," he said. "This was the major city in that part of the world, and hence that gave them sort of a distinct identity. Now that doesn't necessarily work because all of the sudden people are considering a lot of other options."

Visit London's troupe has also delivered its pitch to theater audiences in Dublin, London and Hamburg and Pittsburgh.

So should you expect actors to pitch Crest toothpaste to you the next time you see a Broadway show? It's not likely, given the cost of staging a live commercial and the difficulty of persuading theaters to allow the advertisements.

"They've naturally been a little bit protective of what happens commercially in each theater and a little bit protective of the audience in some ways that they don't want them bombarded with commercials and advertising," Kelling said. "We've had to work very hard to convince producers and creative people that this is something worthwhile, and I think it's only happening really because it's about London."

However, Gary Gardner, a theater professor at UCLA, sees little wrong with introducing a new form of advertising to the theater.

"I can't say that it necessarily offends me," he said.

Gardner is not aware of any other advertisements staged by live actors before theater performances. But it's not the first form of advertising to penetrate the theater -- Broadway playbills are packed with ads, and the theaters themselves are often named for sponsors (the Cadillac Winter Garden, anyone?).

Visit London's entire campaign, which also included bags, Frisbees and other giveaways printed with a pro-tourism message, cost about $930,000, Kelling said.

Calkins said it would be prohibitively expensive for an advertiser to regularly stage live commercials that would only reach a few hundred people at a time. So the real value in Visit London's promotion is the publicity it generates, he said.

"It's almost impossible to justify this unless you get an enormous PR splash out of it because the cost of staging an event like this relative to the audience is enormously high. So you're paying a ton of money to get a relatively small group of people. From an economic standpoint, its unlikely that something like this will be sustainable."

Kelling agreed that generating buzz was one of the main aims of the promotion.

"Part of this is not necessarily how many people will see it in the theater its also about the number of people who will not be in the theater itself but will hear about it."