Advertising Management

Advertising is an element of the marketing mix and hence, advertising objectives are derived, per se, from
the organization’s marketing objectives. From objectives, we move on to advertising strategy and
advertising execution.

But great advertising often needs the agency to go back several stages - back to the base camp; to ground
zero.

Better advertising is born out of a total understanding of all the variable impacting the brand. They may
be new consumer trends, new competition or new technological breakthroughs.

Brand building advertising is created only after cohesive interface between A-B-C-D-E of analysis. Such
advertising is often right on strategy; but great advertising gives strategy the golden glow of creativity.
When selling a washing machine the benefits is not the wash itself, but spotless cloths. An ice cream from
being mearly an indulgence can become a source of nutrition as well with 'real milk.Real ice cream'.

So your advertising process would more or less go through integration of following aspects ( in a way
aspects of brand development).

Broadly the flow would be having the marketing plan in place ( marketing objective + sales objective )

This would be formulated post understanding the various aspects of marketplace, consumer behaviour,
market research, competitive analysis, the brand, organisational realities etc.

Let me explain all this in a few pointers.

Market Analysis Consumer analysis Competitive analysis

-Understanding size, volume/value -Consumer type -Analysing market share
-Growth -Number -Analysing growth
-Regional differences
-Demographics -Analysing product details
-Seasonality
-Psychographics -Analysing pricing

Brand Organisational Realities

-Product Features -Corporate size
-Pricing -Growth objectives
-Distribution -Culture/values
-Positioning -People skills
-Technological skills

All this forms part of marketing plan. Rather they are feed to the advertising objectives, which in turn
formulate the advertising strategy.

The above mentioned aspects always become part of the further strategy action. Becoming integral part of
advertising tactics - promotions and formulation of creative strategy and media strategy

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 Process of Advertising Plan
Many factors have to be considered when making an advertising plan. Like the type of message to be
delivered, the audience to be targeted, how they should be targeted, budget, etc. all of which depends
on the nature of the advertisement.

Regarding the type of message to be delivered, try thinking from the point of the customer. What will
impress him and catch his fancy. Note down points what the customer expects from the company and
what advantage will he have when dealing with the company. Effort should be made to retain viewer or
listener’s or reader’s interest in the advertisement until the end. This procedure is known as message
selection.

After creating the outline of the picture, pick lines that will actually attract the customer. The message
shouldn’t be long enough to bore the customer. Some advertisers are under the illusion that more the
matter written, the better the message delivered. Usually they fear that they don’t miss out any
information. This does nothing but decreases the effectiveness of the ad and customer is left unsatisfied.

For example, the heading of the advertisement shouldn’t be just “We Sell Clothes”, which is too precise.
The liking of the people should be studied and the headline should be designed such that the customer
feels that his needs are met. It should also take into consideration seasonal changes like If the season at
that time is summer and there are lots of beaches around that area, the heading of the ad should
be something like “Summer Clothes for Sale” or “Get the heat off – Buy Swimwear”. The body of the
advertisement should talk of the necessities to switch to summer clothes like cotton clothing. It should
discuss the health point of view too, like cotton cannot be used as swimwear as it will cause
contamination, therefore the swimwear is made of synthetic material. Also include lines about swimwear
for overweight people.

Ads are either traffic builder or relationship builders or reputation builder. Suppose the budget involved is
less, the target should be relationship builder. Because once the customers are established, they will start
trusting the company and won’t switch to other companies. According to a research it takes ten percent
less resources to retain existing customers than attracting new customer. If the focus is on brand
recognition, the advertisement should be traffic building.

The next point is whether the advertiser wants quick results or long lasting results. If quick result is
desired, then a time limit should be levied. Like in case of seasonal sales, the customer hurries to
get advantage before the offer is over. So quick results are expected in this case. But the disadvantage
with advertisement with time limit is that the customer are bound to forget about the product or the
company within a short period and it doesn’t creates a deep impact on the minds of the customer.

Competing against rival company’s ad also contributes to a successful advertising plan. The power of the
message should be compared to that of the competitors’. It doesn’t mean that the advertiser should use the
same plan like his competitor, it would look like imitation and effectiveness will be decreased. But the
advertisement should be planned smartly via a different and effective path, to out-do the competitor’s
advertisement.

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 Evaluating Advertising Effectiveness
Good planning and control of advertising depends on measures of advertising effectiveness. Most of the
money is spent by agencies on pre-testing ads, and much less is spent on evaluating their effectiveness.
Most advertisers try to measure the communication effect of an ad – that is, its potential effect on
awareness, knowledge, or preference. They would also like to measure the ad’s sales effect.

Communication effect research:

It seeks to determine whether an ad is communicating effectively. Called copy testing, it can be done
before an ad is put into media and after it is printed or broadcasted. There are three major methods of
advertising pre-testing:

Direct rating method:

In this case, the consumers are asked to rate the alternative ads. These ratings are used to evaluate the ads.

Portfolio tests:

Here, the consumers are asked to view or listen to a portfolio of advertisements, taking as much as time as
they need. Consumers are then asked to recall all the ads and their content, aided or unaided by the
interviewer.

Laboratory tests:

It uses equipment to measure the physiological reactions – heartbeat, blood pressure, pupil dilation,
perspiration – to an ad. These tests measure attention getting power but reveal nothing about the impact
on beliefs, attitudes, or intensions.

Sales effect research:

Advertising’s sales effect is generally difficult to measure than its communication effect. This is mainly
because the sales are influenced by many other factors, such as the product features, price, availability, as
well as the competitor’s actions. Companies are generally interested in finding out whether they are
overspending or under spending on advertising.

Researchers try to measure the sales impact through analyzing either historical or experimental data.

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 How Traditional Advertising is different
from Internet Advertising
The following table shows how Traditional Advertising is different from Internet Advertising

RADITIONAL ADV. (TA) INTERNET ADV. (IA)

TA is static. It is dynamic with multimedia-

supporting text and graphics video
sound all together.

Space is not a restricting factor Space is a problem, as regards size of

the banners etc.

The proportion of advertising to A web page would be 91% editorial

editorial is high sometimes 50:50. and 9% advertising.

Does not evoke immediate action. Invokes immediate action as you at-
least need to click on the ad.

Response to the action is not First response is immediate as when the

immediate. user clicks, the person is directed to
other web page with more details.

Advertisements are passively received. The user has high attention level and
concentration while using the net, and
hence they notice the ad. (please refer
the chapter)

Advertising does not always target a This can be much focused.

much focused audience.

Advertisements are ubiquitous. Advertisements catch users when they

are on the lookout for something. For
example the search is for travel on a
search engine there are ads of travel
agents on the net.

Difficult to track the exact number of This is quite possible with Internet
people who saw the advertisement. advertisements.

Ads are graphic intensive and avoid Both copy and graphics are restricted
copy overload. by the banner size specifications.

The costs would be prohibitive to There are no such constraints.

reach a global audience.

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 Types of Advertisements
Consumer Advertising

These are basically nothing but product or service advertisements directed towards the consumer or the
customer as such.

Such advertisements can be in the form of national or local advertisements also. Such kind of
advertisements uses emotional or rational appeal in their advertisement.

Advertisements such as that of DeBeers, pizza hut etc use the emotional appeal to attract the consumers.
On the other hand advertisements such as the Kawasaki bajaj caliber, Vim Bar etc. use the rational appeal
to address its target audience.

The advertisement of DeBeers uses an emotional appeal because the statement “I have my feet firmly
planted on the ground except when I’m wearing the millennium diamond” suggests that by wearing them
u can fly high in the sky and feel like what Urmila does in the advertisement

Advertising to business or profession

This type of advertising is aimed at resellers and professionals. The media used here is direct mail or
professional magazines. These are ads which are not directed towards the final consumers.

Corporate ads are also a part of these types of ads. The target groups of corporate advertising are most
often customers, stockholders, employees, financial institutions, political leaders and government.
The objectives of the corporate or the institutional ads may be to establish or boost corporate identity and
image, counter negative attitudes towards a company, industry or to promote and relate the company to
some worthwhile social public interest cause. The recent Aditya Birla group campaign would fit into this
category

Non- product advertising

In this type of advertising advertisements depicting an idea, a social cause etc is included. Surrogate
advertisements are also a part of such non- product advertisements.

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 The Five M’s of Advertising
The organizations handle their advertising in different ways. In small companies, advertising is handled
by someone in the sales or marketing department, who works with an ad ageny. A large company will
often set up its own advertising department or else hire an ad agency to do the job of preparing
advertising programmers.

In developing a program, marketing managers must always start by identifying the target market and the
buyer’s motives. Then they can make the five major decisions in developing an advertising program,
known as the five M’s, viz.

 Mission: what are the advertising objectives?

 Money: how much can be spent?

 Message: what message can be sent?

 Media: what media should be used

 Measurement: how should the results is evaluated?

The above mentioned can be explained by the diagram given below

The 5Ms of Advertising

Checklist for planning of a marketing or advertising campaign.

 What are the objectives?

 Mission
 What is the key objective?

 How much is it worth to reach my objectives?

 Money
 How much can be spent?

 What message should be sent?

 Message
 Is the message clear and easily understood?

 What media vehicles are available?

 Media
 What media vehicles should be used?

 How should the results be measured?

 Measurement  How should the results be evaluated and
followed up?