Download Advertising: Advertising is any paid form of non personal

Advertising:
Advertising is any paid form of non personal presentation and promotion of a product by an
identified sponsor using the mass media that is intended to inform or persuade members of a
particular audience. For many, advertising is the most familiar and visible element of the
promotion mix. Because it can convey rich and dynamic images, advertising can establish and
reinforce a distinctive brand identity. This helps marketers bond with customers and boost sales.
Advertising is useful in communicating factual information about the product or reminding
consumers to buy their favorite brand. Advertising sometimes suffers from a credibility problem
because cynical consumers tune out messages they think are biased or are intended to sell them
something they don’t need. Advertising can be expensive; therefore, firms need to take great care
to ensure their messages are effective. Mass consumption and geographically dispersed markets
make advertising particularly appropriate for marketing products using the same promotional
messages to large audiences.
Types of Advertising:
Product Advertising
Product advertising is an advertising message that focuses on a specific product. This is
the type of advertising the average person usually thinks of when talking about most promotional
activities.
Institutional Advertising
Institutional advertising is an advertising message that promotes the activities, personality, or
point of view of an industry, organization, person, geographical location, or government agency.
Institutional advertising is often closely related to the public-relations function of organizations.
Some institutional messages state an organization’s position on an issue to sway public opinion.
This is called advocacy advertising. Public service advertisements (PSAs) are advertisements
the media runs free of charge for not-for-profit organizations that serve society in some way or to
support an issue.
Retail and Local Advertising
Major retailers and small, local businesses advertise to encourage consumers to shop at specific
stores or to use local services. Much of the local advertising focuses on store hours, location, and
products that are available or on sale. Retail advertisers spend more than any other type of
advertiser per year.
Organization of the Advertising Function:
Organizational arrangements for the advertising function vary among organizations. In small
companies, advertising may be handled by someone in the sales department. The advertising
function is usually organized in larger organizations as a staff department reporting to the vice
president or director of marketing. The director of advertising is an executive position with the
responsibility for the functional activity of advertising. This position requires a skilled and
experienced advertiser and an individual who communicates effectively within the organization.
The success of a firm’s promotional strategy depends on the advertising director’s willingness
and ability to communicate both vertically and horizontally in the organization. The major tasks
typically organized under advertising include advertising research, design, copywriting, media
analysis, and sometimes sales and trade promotion.
An advertising campaign is a coordinated, comprehensive plan that carries out promotion
objectives and results in a series of advertisements placed in media over a specified time period.
Although a campaign may be based around a single ad, most have multiple ads with all ads in the
campaign having the same look, feel, and message. Creating and executing an advertising
campaign often means many companies work together, and it requires a broad range of skilled
people to do the job correctly. Some firms may do their own advertising. In many cases,
however, organizations retain one or more outside advertising agencies to develop advertising
messages on their behalf. Most large companies use outside advertising agencies because they
offer several advantages. Some companies who use advertising agencies also manage to reduce
the cost of advertising by avoiding many of the fixed expenses associated with maintaining an
internal advertising department.
Developing an Advertising Campaign:
An advertising campaign should be intimately related to the organization’s overall promotional
goals. The organization and its advertising agency, if it uses one, must have a good idea of whom
it wants to reach, what it will take to appeal to this market, and where and when the messages
should be placed. Organizations and/or agencies need to take several steps to develop and
implement the advertising campaign: identify the target market; set message goals; set the
budget; design the ads; pretest; select media; execute the campaign; and posttest.
Identifying the Target Market
The target market of an advertising campaign is identified from research and segmentation
decisions. Researchers try to understand the customer so that messages can be created that the
customer will comprehend and respond to.
Setting Message Goals
Message goals for a campaign can be increasing brand awareness, boosting sales by a certain
percentage, or changing the image of a product. Sometimes the objective is simply to get people
to recognize that they need the product. Effective advertising strategies accomplish at least one
of three objectives: informing, persuading, or reminding consumers. The secret to success in
choosing the best strategy is developing a message that best positions a firm’s product in the
audience’s mind. Marketers often combine several advertising strategies to ensure that the
advertisement accomplishes set objectives. As markets become more segmented, the need for
personalized advertising increases.
Setting the Budget
After determining message goals, the organization next sets its advertising budget. Advertising is
expensive. A firm allocates a percentage of its overall promotion budget to advertising,
depending on how much and what type of advertising it can afford. Five methods for setting
promotion budgets are listed below:
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Affordable method – Promotion budget is set at the level management thinks the
company can afford.
Percentage-of-sales method – Promotion budget is set as a specified percentage of either
past or forecasted sales.
Fixed-sum-per-unit method – Promotion budget is set as a pre-determined dollar
amount for each unit sold or produced.
Meeting competition method – Promotion budget is set to match competitor’s
promotion outlays on either an absolute or relative basis.
Task-objective method – Once marketers determine their specific promotion objectives,
the amount (and type) of promotional spending needed to achieve them is determined.
The task-objective method develops a promotion budget based on a sound evaluation of
the firm’s promotion objectives. As a result, it regulates its allocation of funds to modern
marketing practices. Although this is the most rational approach, it is hard to implement
because it requires managers to specify their objectives and attach dollar amounts to
them.
A brand’s advertising budget often depends on its stage in the product life cycle. New products
typically need large advertising budgets to build awareness and to persuade consumers to try the
products. Mature brands, however, usually require lower budgets as a ratio to sales.
Media Selection
One of the most important decisions in developing an advertising strategy is the selection of
appropriate media to carry the organization’s message to its audience. The media selected must
be capable of accomplishing the communications objectives of informing, persuading, and
reminding potential customers of the product being advertised.
Media planning is a problem-solving process for getting a message to a target audience in the
most efficient and effective fashion. The decisions to be made include audience selection and
where, when, and how frequent the exposure should be. The choice depends on the specific
target audience, the objective of the message, and the budget. For the advertising campaign to be
effective, the media planner must match up the profile of the target market with specific media
vehicles. The first task for a media planner is to find out when and where people in the target
market are most likely to be exposed to the communication. This is called aperture.
Impressions, Reach, Frequency, Impact, and CPM
When analyzing media, the planner is interested in assessing advertising exposure, the degree to
which the target market will see an advertising message in a specific medium. Media planners
talk in terms of impressions, which measure the number of people who will be exposed to a
message placed in one or more media vehicles. To calculate the exposure a message will have if
placed in a certain medium, planners consider reach andfrequency. Reach is a measure of the
percentage of people in the target market who are exposed to the ad campaign at least once
during a given period of time. Frequency is a measure of how many times the average person in
the target market is exposed to the message. Gross rating points (GRPs) are calculated by
multiplying reach times frequency. Media planners can use GRPs to compare the effectiveness of
different media vehicles. The advertiser also must decide on the desired media impact—the
qualitative value of a message exposure through a given medium and/or medium vehicle. The
same message in one magazine, for example, may be more believable than in another. In general,
the more reach, frequency, and impact the advertiser seeks, the higher the advertising budget will
have to be. Although some media vehicles deliver superior exposure, they may not be costefficient. To compare the relative cost-effectiveness of different media and of spots run on
different vehicles in the same medium, media planners use a measure called cost per thousand
(CPM). This figure compares the relative cost-effectiveness of different media vehicles that have
different exposure rates and reflects the cost to deliver a message to 1,000 people.
The media planner has to know the reach, frequency, and impact of each of the major media
types and the specific vehicles being considered for each type. The major media types are
newspapers, television, radio, magazines, outdoor, and the Internet. Each medium has advantages
and disadvantages.
Traditional Media
Television
Because of television’s ability to reach so many people at once, it is the medium of choice for
regional or national companies. Advertising on a television network can be very expensive.
Advertisers may prefer to buy local television time rather than network time because it’s cheaper
or because they have a more localized target market. Television advertising offers good massmarket coverage and low cost per exposure. Television combines sight, sound, and motion,
appealing to the senses. It has high absolute costs, fleeting exposure, and less audience
selectivity.
Radio
One advantage of radio advertising is flexibility. Marketers can change commercials quickly,
often on the spot by an announcer and a recording engineer. Radio is attractive to advertisers
seeking low cost and the ability to reach specific consumer segments. Radio has good local
acceptance as well. On the negative side, radio only offers audio and has fleeting exposure.
There tends to be low attention by the audience, and the audience can be fragmented.
Newspapers
Retailers in particular have relied on newspaper ads since before the turn of the century to inform
readers about sales and deliveries of new merchandise. Newspapers are an excellent medium for
local advertising and for events that require a quick response. Newspaper advertising is flexible,
timely, and believable. It has good local market coverage and broad acceptability. Disadvantages
include a short life, poor reproduction quality, and a small pass-along audience.
Magazines
Magazines are an important advertising medium because approximately 92 percent of adults look
through at least one magazine per month. Magazines have adapted to changing times by
narrowing their segments. New technologies such as selective binding allow publishers to
personalize their editions so that advertisements for local businesses can be included in issues
mailed to specific locations only. Magazine advertising has high geographic and demographic
selectivity, credibility and prestige, high-quality reproduction, and long life and good pass-along
readership. Unfortunately, magazine advertising presents a long ad purchase lead time, high cost,
and no guarantee of position.
Outdoor Advertising
Traditional outdoor advertising takes the form of billboards, painted bulletins or displays, and
electric signs and displays. Today, advertisers are finding new places to put their messages
outdoors. This form of advertising is flexible, has high repeat exposure, is low cost, has low
message competition, and has good positional selectivity. However, outdoor advertising has little
audience selectivity and creative limitations.
Evaluating Advertising:
A famous retailer, John Wanamaker, once said, “I am certain that half of the money I spend on
advertising is completely wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” Research findings
generally support the wisdom of spending money on advertising. Studies show that increased
advertising increases sales, and that increased product usage is linked to advertising exposure.
There’s no doubt, however, that much advertising is ineffective. Therefore, organizations should
evaluate their advertising efforts in order to increase their advertising success.
Post testing
Post testing means conducting research on consumers’ responses to advertising messages they
have seen or heard. In some cases the ads are popular, but they send the wrong message to
consumers. Three ways to measure the impact of an advertisement are unaided recall, aided
recall, and attitudinal measures. Unaided recall tests by telephone survey or personal
interview whether a person remembers seeing an ad during a specified period of time without
giving the person the name of the brand. An aided recall test uses the name of the brand and
sometimes other clues to prompt answers. Attitudinal measures probe more deeply by testing
consumer beliefs or feelings about a product before and after being exposed to messages about it.
Direct Marketing:
Direct marketing is direct non personal communications between carefully targeted consumers
or organizations and sellers designed to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting
relationships. The response could come in the form of an order, a request for further
information, and/or a visit to a store or other place of business for purchase of a product. While
many people equate direct marketing with direct mail, this promotional category also includes
telephone marketing (telemarketing), direct-response advertising and infomercials on television
and radio, direct-response print advertising, and electronic media such as fax, email, and the
Internet.