Duh, right? Taken at face value, that statement is about as surprising as the news that Sarah Jessica Parker pays wholesale for Prada.
Let's look a little deeper though. If "retail advertising" means the typical ad boldly featuring products or claiming a low price, then you were finished before the reader even got to that page. If "shoppers" means you still hang on to the dream that your future customer is reading the headlines and simultaneously checking a mental list of all her strongest needs, then it may be time to stop watching so much TV Land.
Chances are, the shopper you are trying to reach is turning the pages while they also do something else; they're on the treadmill at the club, or grabbing lunch at their desk. Unless it's your partner, or your competitor they probably aren't turning the pages looking out for your latest ad. To deliver a return on your investment, your ad's must get the consumer's attention and keep it.
"Advertisers cannot persuade consumers unless they have their attention first, and attention is progressively the bottleneck-in fact, it has been called the 'scarcest resource' in business," said Michael Weddel, a researcher at the Michigan Business School. "When print ads fail to attract consumers' attention, the financial implications are huge."
We're all sophisticated consumers now, and we've all been through this before; ad's are everywhere, and we've all gotten pretty good at not noticing a lot of the ones we see.
Ad's that work aren't about your store. Ad's that work are about your customers. Especially today, people are a lot more concerned about their own life, their own happiness, than they are about any store, or any brand. The ad's they are going to notice are the ones that quickly and clearly speak right to them. Effective advertising works by offering a reader something they consider personally relevant, right now, and by giving them some bit of information they think is worth remembering.
The advertising campaigns TAD creates will leave traces of you in the reader's memory. And that's why people will buy from you, not because you managed to sell them something.