Marketing Series: You Must Advertise But How?

 ADVERTISING

Advertising is so much a part of marketing that many people think of the two as the same thing. Remember, product, price, and distribution strategies are just as important as marketing communications. Advertising is nonpersonal communication an identified sponsor pays for that uses mass media to persuade or inform an audience.

TV everywhere (also known as authenticated streaming) is a term that describes using your Internet-enabled device, like a tablet or smartphone, to stream content from your cable or satellite provider.

Video Lesson: Advertising Campaign (Duration: 11.41 mins)

Types of Advertising Based on Marketing Goals

The advertisements an organization runs can take many forms.

1. Product Advertising

• With product advertising, the message focuses on a specific good or service. Most of the advertising we see or hear is product advertising.

2. Institutional Advertising

• Institutional advertising promotes the activities, personality, or point of view of an organization or company. Corporate advertising promotes the company as a whole instead of the firm’s individual products.
• Public service advertisements (PSAs) are advertisements the media runs free of charge. These messages promote not-for-profit organizations that serve society in some way, or they champion an issue such as increasing literacy or discouraging drunk driving.

3. Retail and Local Advertising

• Both major retailers and small, local businesses advertise to encourage customers to shop at a specific store or use a local service.

 

Who Creates Advertising?

• An advertising campaign is a coordinated, comprehensive plan that carries out promotion objectives and results in a series of advertisements placed in various media over a period. Although a campaign may be based around a single ad idea, most use multiple messages with all ads in the campaign having the same look and feel.
• Although some firms create their own advertising in-house, in many cases several specialized companies work together to develop an advertising campaign. Typically, the firm retains one or more outside advertising agencies to oversee this process. A limited-service agency provides one or more specialized services, such as media buying or creative development. In contrast, a full-service agency supplies most or all of the services a campaign requires, including research, creation of ad copy and art, media selection, and production of the final messages.
• Big or small, an advertising agency hires a range of specialists to craft a message and make the communication concept a reality:
• Account management: The account executive, or account manager, is the “soul” of the operation. This person supervises the day-to-day activities on the account and is the primary liaison between the agency and the client. The account executive has to ensure that the client is happy while he verifies that people within the agency execute the desired strategy. The account planner combines research and account strategy to act as the voice of the consumer in creating effective advertising.
• Creative services: Creatives are the “heart” of the communication effort. These people actually dream up and produce the ads.
• Research and marketing services: Researchers are the “brains” of the campaign. They collect and analyze information that will help account executives develop a sensible strategy.
• Media planning: The media planner is the “legs” of the campaign. He helps to determine which communication vehicles are the most effective and recommends the most efficient means to deliver the ad by deciding where, when, and how often it will appear.

 

User-Generated Advertising Content

• The latest promotional craze is to let your customers actually create your advertising for you. User-generated content (UGC), also known as consumer-generated media (CGM) includes the millions of online consumer comments, opinions, advice, consumer-to-consumer discussions, reviews, photos, images, videos, podcasts and webcasts and product-related stories available to other consumers through digital technology.
• Marketers that embrace this strategy understand that it is OK to let people have fun with their products.
• Some marketers encourage consumers to contribute their own do-it-yourself (DIY) ads.
• Crowdsourcing is a practice in which firms outsource marketing activities (such as selecting an ad) to a community of users, i.e., a crowd. The idea behind crowdsourcing is that if you want to know what consumers think and what they like, the most logical thing to do is to ask them.  

 

Ethical Issues in Advertising

• Advertising is manipulative
• Advertising is deceptive and untruthful

In addition to fining firms for deceptive advertising, the FTC also has the power to require firms to run corrective advertising; messages that clarify or qualify previous claims.

Other ads, although not illegal, may create a biased impression of products when they use puffery—claims of superiority that neither sponsors nor critics of the ads can prove are true or untrue. Many consumers today are concerned about greenwashing, a practice in which companies promote their products as environmentally friendly when in truth the brand provides little ecological benefit.

• Advertising is offensive and in bad taste
• Advertising causes people to buy things they don’t really need.

 

Develop the Advertising Campaign

The following is a description of the steps in creating an advertising campaign:

Step 1: Understand the Target Audience

• The best way to communicate with an audience is to understand as much as possible about them and what turns them on and off. Marketers often identify the target audience for an advertising campaign from research.

Step 2: Establish Message and Budget Objectives

• Advertising objectives should be consistent with the overall communications plan. Advertising objectives will generally include objectives for both the message and the budget.
  • Set Message Objectives - Advertising can inform, persuade, and remind.

• • Set Budget Objectives - Advertising is expensive. An objective of many firms is to allocate a percentage of the overall communication budget to advertising.

Step 3: Create Ads

• The creation of the advertising begins when an agency formulates a creative strategy, which gives the advertising “creative” (art directors, copywriters, photographers and others) the direction and inspiration they need to begin the creative process.
• The strategy is summarized in a written document known as a creative brief; a rough blueprint that guides but does not restrict the creative process.  It provides only the most relevant information and insights about the marketing situation, the advertising objective, the competition, the advertising target and, most importantly, the message that the advertising must deliver.

 

Advertising Appeals

• An advertising appeal is the central idea of the ad and the basis of the advertising messages. It is the approach used to influence the consumer. Informational appeals are based on a unique selling proposition (USP) that gives consumers a clear, single-minded reason why the product is better at solving a problem.
• Generally, we think of appeals as informational or emotional. Of course, not all ads fit into these two appeal categories. Well-established brands often use reminder advertising just to keep their name in people’s minds or be sure that consumers repurchase the product as necessary. Sometimes advertisers use teaser or mystery ads to generate curiosity and interest in a to-be-introduced product.

Execution Formats

The execution format describes the basic structure of the message. Some of the more common formats, sometimes used in combination, include:

• Comparison: A comparative advertisement explicitly names one or more competitors.
• Demonstration: The ad shows a product “in action” to prove that it performs as claimed: “It slices, it dices!”

• Brand Storytelling: Modern storytelling commercials are like 30-second movies with plots that involve the product in a peripheral way.
• Testimonial: A celebrity, an expert, or a “man in the street” states the product’s effectiveness. The use of celebrity endorsers is a common but expensive strategy.
• Slice of life: A slice-of-life format presents a (dramatized) scene from everyday life.
• Lifestyle: A lifestyle format shows a person or persons attractive to the target market in an appealing setting. The advertised product is “part of the scene,” implying that the person who buys it will attain the lifestyle.
• Rich media. Rich media advertising provides digital ads that have advanced features.

 

Tonality

Tonality refers to the mood or attitude the message conveys. Some common tonalities include:  

• Straightforward: Straightforward ads simply present the information to the audience in a clear manner.

• Humor: Humorous, witty, or outrageous ads can be an effective way to break through advertising clutter.

• Dramatic: A dramatization, like a play, presents a problem and a solution in a manner that is often exciting and suspenseful—a difficult challenge in 30 or 60 seconds.

• Romantic: Ads that present a romantic situation can be especially effective at getting consumers’ attention and at selling products people associate with dating and mating.

• Sexy: Some ads appear to sell sex rather than products. Sex appeal ads are more likely to be effective when there is a connection between the product and sex (or at least romance).
• Apprehension/fear: Some ads highlight the negative consequences of not using a product. In general, fear appeals can be successful if the audience perceives there to be an appropriate level of intensity in the fear appeal.

 

Creative Tactics and Techniques

• Animation and Art: Not all ads are executed with film or photography.
• Celebrities
• Jingles are original words and music written specifically for advertising executions.
• Slogans link the brand to a simple linguistic device that is memorable (jingles do the same but set the slogan to music).

 

Step 4: Pretest What the Ads Will Say

• Advertisers try to minimize mistakes by getting reactions to ad messages before they actually place them. Much of this pre-testing, the research that goes on in the early stages of a campaign, centers on gathering basic information that will help planners be sure they’ve accurately defined the product’s market, consumers, and competitors.

Step 5: Choose the Media Type(s) and Media Schedule

• Media planning is a problem-solving process for getting a message to a target audience in the most effective way. Planning decisions include audience selection and where, when, and how frequent the exposure should be. Thus, 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 communication.
• There is no such thing as one perfect medium for advertising.

Step 6: Evaluate the Advertising 

• With so many messages competing for the attention of frazzled customers, it is especially important for firms to evaluate their efforts to increase the impact of their messages.
• Posttesting means conducting research on consumers’ responses to advertising messages they have seen or heard as opposed to pre-testing, which as we have seen collects reactions to messages before they are actually placed in “the real world.”
• Three ways to measure the impact of an advertisement:

1. 1. Unaided recall tests by telephone survey or personal interview whether a person remembers seeing an ad during a specified period without giving the person the name of the brand.
   2. An aided recall test uses the name of the brand and sometimes other clues to prompt answers.
   3. Attitudinal measures probe a bit more deeply by testing consumers’ beliefs or feelings about a product before and after they are exposed to messages about it.

 

Traditional Mass Media

The following is a list of the major categories of media:

• Television
• Radio
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Directories
• Out-of-home media
• Internet websites
• Place-based media
• Branded entertainment
• Advergaming
• Mobile phones

 

Branded Entertainment

• As we noted earlier, more and more marketers rely on paid product placements in TV shows and movies to grab the attention of consumers who tune out traditional ad messages as fast as they see them. These placements are an important form of branded entertainment; a strategy where marketers integrate products into all sorts of venues including movies, television shows, videogames, novels and even retail settings. Beyond movies and television shows, what better way to promote to the video generation than through brand placements in video games? The industry calls this technique advergaming. Native advertising has marketing material that mimics or resembles the content of the website that it is posted on.

 

Support Media

• Support media reach people who may not have been reached by mass media advertising and these platforms support the messages traditional media delivers.
  • Directory advertising
  • Out-of-home media. In recent years, outdoor advertising has pushed the technology envelope with digital signage that enables the source to change the message at will.
  • Place-based media

Digital Media

The term digital media refers to any media that are digital rather than analog. The more popular types of digital media advertisers use today include e-mail, websites, ads placed on other websites and blogs, social media sites such as Facebook, search engines such as Google, and digital video such as YouTube.

Digital media can be classified as owned, paid, and earned:

• Owned media are Internet sites, such as websites, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, that are owned by an advertiser.
• Paid media are Internet media, such as display ads, sponsorships, and paid key word searches, that are paid for by an advertiser.
• Earned media are word-of-mouth or buzz using social media where the advertiser has no control.

 

Website Advertising

• Online advertising offers several advantages over other media platforms. First, the Internet provides new ways to finely target customers. Web user registrations and cookies allow sites to track user preferences and deliver ads based on previous Internet behavior. In addition, because the website can track how many times an ad is “clicked,” advertisers can measure in real time how people respond to specific online messages.
• The following is a description of forms of Internet advertising:
  • Banners, rectangular graphics at the top or bottom of web pages, were the first form of web advertising.
  • Buttons are small banner-type advertisements that a company can place anywhere on a page.
• A pop-up ad is an advertisement that appears on the screen while a web page loads or after it has loaded.
• Pre-roll ads, A promotional video message that plays before the content the user has selected.
• E-mail advertising that transmits messages to very large numbers of inboxes simultaneously is one of the easiest ways to communicate with consumers—it is the same price whether you send ten messages or ten thousand. One downside to this platform is spam, sending unsolicited e-mail to five or more people not known to the sender. Many websites offer the opportunity to refuse unsolicited e-mail via ad blocking. This permission marketing strategy gives the consumer the power to opt in or opt out.

Social media advertising

• Social media advertising is advertising that is executed within the confines of social media channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Marketers realize that they need to go wherever the clients are—now the clients can be found frequently hanging out in a variety of online social communities. 

Search Engines 

• Search engines are Internet programs that search for documents with specified key words. Search marketing refers to marketing strategies that involve the use of Internet search engines. With search engine marketing (SEM), the search engine company charges marketers to display sponsored search ads that appear at the top or beside the search results. 

Mobile Advertising

• The Mobile Marketing Association defines mobile advertising as “a form of advertising that is communicated to the consumer via a handset. Mobile marketing offers advertisers a variety of ways to speak to customers (ideally with the customer’s permission), including mobile websites, mobile applications or apps, text message ads, and mobile video and TV. Developers of mobile apps must find some way to monetize their product. The best strategy for in-app advertising is to use advertising that creates revenue and entertains and engages the user. QR code advertising offers another way to engage consumers via their mobile phones. QR code advertising QR (quick response) code advertising uses smartphone GPS technology to deliver ads and other information to consumers in stores and in other locations.

Video Sharing: Check It Out on YouTube

• Video sharing describes the strategy of uploading video recordings or vlogs (pronounced vee-logs) to Internet sites such as YouTube so that thousands or even millions of other Internet users can check them out. For marketers, YouTube provides vast opportunities to build relationships with consumers
  

 

Ethical Issues in Digital Media Advertising

• Ad fraud, or click fraud js the use of automated browsers to falsify the number of views or click-throughs the advertisers must pay for ad blocking. The use of powerful ad-blocking software was created to stop ad fraud by stripping ads from the website at the network level. Mobile hijacking is the use of automated browsers to falsify the number of views or click-throughs the advertisers must pay for.

When and How Often to Say It: Media Scheduling

• After he or she chooses the advertising media, the planner then creates a media schedule that specifies the exact media the campaign will use as well as when and how often the message should appear. The media schedule outlines the planner’s best estimate of which media will be most effective to attain the advertising objective(s) and which specific media vehicles will do the most effective job.
• A continuous schedule maintains a steady stream of advertising throughout the year. This is most appropriate for products that we buy on a regular basis.
• A pulsing schedule varies the amount of advertising throughout the year based on when the product is likely to be in demand. Flighting is an extreme form of pulsing in which advertising appears in short, intense bursts alternating with periods of little to no activity. It can produce as much brand awareness as a steady dose of advertising at a much lower cost if the messages from the previous flight were noticed and made an impact.