Advertising Management in a Digital Environment

Text and Cases

Larry D. Kelley, Kim Bartel Sheehan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000414103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Advertising Management in a Digital Environment: Text and Cases blends the latest methods for digital communication and an understanding of the global landscape with the best practices of the functional areas of management.

Divided into three core sections, the book provides a truly holistic approach to Advertising Management. The first part considers the fundamentals of advertising management, including leadership, ethics and corporate social responsibility, and finance and budgeting. The second part considers human capital management and managing across cultures, whilst the third part discusses strategic planning, decision making and brand strategy. To demonstrate how theory translates to practice in advertising, each chapter is illustrated with real-life case studies from a broad range of sectors, and practical exercises allow case analysis and further learning.

This new textbook offers an integrated and global approach to Advertising Management and should be core or recommended reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Media Management, Advertising, Marketing Management and Strategy, Communications and Public Relations. The applied approach provided by case study analysis makes it equally suitable for those in executive education and studying for professional qualifications.

Chapter 1

The new world of advertising management

Digital and global

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

This chapter is intended to help you:

• Learn the foundation principles of advertising management.
• Understand the different managerial roles in advertising.
• Learn about the impact of digital advertising on management.
• Learn about the impact of globalization on management.
• Understand daily management challenges dealing with change.

Every organization needs managers. You would have likely witnessed organizations that are not well managed and some that are well managed. You may have seen the old sitcom The Office and wondered if that is what managers really do. Or perhaps you have watched the Mad Men television series about the advertising industry in the 1960s and wondered if that is what it is like in the real world today.

Management seems like such an ambiguous job. Is it just about sitting in an office or going to meetings or filling out mind-numbing amounts of paperwork? Is there more to it than that? And how is management different in the advertising industry? Or is it really? Are all managers the same?

Throughout this text, we will answer these questions. Management is largely a generic term. Some popular definitions include the following.

• The process of dealing with or controlling things or people
• The act of supervising something
• The collective body of those who direct an enterprise or organization

Just about any enterprise or organization needs someone or a group to direct that enterprise or organization. Not all enterprises and organizations are the same. Being an advertising manager is a very different experience than being a manager at a McDonalds. While they both may direct an enterprise, the enterprise itself is so radically different that it does require a unique skill set.

If you can manage a McDonalds, I would dare say you could likely manage any other restaurant. Those skills are quite transferable. In fact, you might make a case that a McDonald’s manager could manage just about any retail store. The basics are relatively the same. All retailers sell a tangible product (or products).

Advertising is different. It is in the business of selling ideas—not just any idea; it is communication ideas that change the way people think and/or behave about a specific product, service or organization. And this difference demands different ways of looking at managing. Let’s take a look at the foundation principles of advertising management.

Advertising management foundation principles

Advertising management has four broad components. We call them the 4Ps of advertising management. They are as follows.

• People
• Process
• Planning
• Profit

Advertising management involves managing people, developing processes to ensure that work is done both effectively yet efficiently, planning for the future and helping the company make a profit.

While just about every manager is involved in some form of these four components of management, each of these areas has unique aspects specific to the advertising industry.

People are the product

Advertising is a creative business. It is an idea-driven business. As a result, the people that are attracted to the advertising industry are different. They are not like engineers who build a building. They are content creators who build strategic communication campaigns.

The job of the manager is to find ways to make the people employed with an organization thrive. That means hiring the right people, rewarding them properly and giving them the space to do their job. Many view advertising managers more as a coach than as a traditional manager. The management challenge is to help your team stay motivated. Since advertising is about being “creative on demand,” sometimes that is no easy task. It is difficult to be “on” all the time. Yet that is what the advertising industry demands. The client or project dictates when you need to be “creative,” whereby you think about things in a new and unique way. As a manager, your job then becomes to help mold or take others’ ideas and push them forward—make them even better. This is no simple task. It requires a deft touch whereby the manager pushes their associates to think better without alienating them.

Another key part of managing people is to make sure they work together. Developing an advertising campaign is a collaborative process. It requires creative content that may begin with writers and art directors and end up with producers or information architects. It also requires content connectors, media planners and buyers, digital specialists, social media specialists and many others to determine how best to connect the content to the audience. All of this must focus on strategy, so there are account planners, brand strategists and others who provide strategic input. Account managers, then, are the team leaders. They ensure that all of these groups work together. It is a complex dance with a variety pack of people and egos.

As we will discuss in later chapters, the other side of managing is firing people. This may be for poor performance or for not fitting in. Or they may be doing a great job and the company needs to let them go for economic reasons.

The manager needs to be in constant communication with his or her associates so that they are not “blindsided” by bad news. This also requires a deft touch so that you have provided important information yet haven’t demotivated your staff.

Working with people is the cornerstone of advertising management.

Process: making things run smoothly

You’ve hired the right team. Now they have to do the work. Another key advertising management function is to make sure that things run smoothly. Determining if your team has the right resources to do the job is a part of management. Do they have the right information? Do you have a system where there is seamless collaboration?

Setting up advertising processes is not like building a car or like setting up an assembly line. Persuasive communication comes from the understanding of consumer insights. Compelling communication taps into emotional nerve ends that may not have been previously explored. Campaigns can’t go viral just like that. Going viral is something that isn’t ordered like a hamburger. Sometimes advertising campaigns come into existence as the result of “happy circumstances” where two or three associates are discussing ideas or alternatives and that triggers an even better idea.

On the flip side, there are demanding timetables. A client can’t wait forever for the “happy circumstance” to happen. They may need to be in the market with a message in a day or a week.

That is the management challenge—setting up a process that gets the best and most innovative thinking in the shortest amount of time, and then executing the ideas quickly in consideration of the budget parameters.

Well, are you beginning to see why managers get paid well? Their job simply isn’t easy.

Planning: making the future bright

One of the bigger management challenges is to be in the moment with people and processes yet have an eye to the future endeavors. As a manager, one of your roles is to always be thinking ahead. You need to have a plan. That plan might include what kind of people you may need in the future, what resources will you need and, more importantly, where the business will be in the next three to five years.

As a manager, you need to be constantly looking at the horizon; in the advertising industry, that means understanding where consumer trends are going. It means understanding where communication is going. What will be the new media channels or platforms of tomorrow?

Your employees or associates are counting on you to lead them to a brighter future. You can’t do that without trying to figure out where the future is going.

As you wrestle with the daily work routine and the flow of work, you must continue to be curious about all aspects of business and society. Those factors will ultimately impact your management plan.

Make a profit

All managers must deal with a budget; there is likely a budget for personnel and there could be a budget for resources. Budget management is certainly a part of every manager’s life.

The broader picture of financial management is helping the organization make a profit, for without a profit, the company will not exist. Advertising managers must understand the basics of finance. They must also understand the role they play in making the company profitable. Those are core management functions.

The other big picture regarding profit is how to measure the impact of an advertising program. Is the program generating the impact it was designed to create? And how does that impact translate to some form of return on investment.

All advertising programs are an investment for the company and/or brand. Many times, the investment in advertising is one of the larger dollar commitments made by a company. This is especially true if a company is investing a large amount of dollars into paid media. This can be millions of dollars. Thus, there is pressure to understand what the brand got in return for that investment.

Advertising managers must know their way around the fundamentals of budgeting, accounting, finance and financial analysis. It is a necessary part of being a manager.

Advertising management roles and organization structure

There are many different companies that are part of the advertising ecosystem.

The type of organization, its ownership structure and its organizational structure will dictate the type of advertising management needed.

We will deal with four overall categories of organizations that are involved with the advertising industry. They are as follows.

• Advertiser
• Advertising agencies
• Media
• Specialty vendors

The advertiser is a company or organization that is being promoted by the advertising. This could be a large corporation such as General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Nike or Apple. Or it can be a small retailer such as a local pet store, a florist or even a barbershop.

Some large advertisers such as a General Motors may have their own in-house advertising department. Or they may use an outside advertising agency. Or they may do a bit of both. A small advertiser such as a florist may handle their own advertising or they may hire a consultant to help them.

How a client structures their advertising program will dictate the need for management roles. Some may have a large team that requires many managers; others may have a single person or a small team, and still others may be doing advertising as a part of all the necessary business activities needed to make their business run.

Advertising agencies work for advertisers to help conceptualize, develop and place advertising on their behalf. Some advertising agencies do all of these activities, and some agencies just focus on a specific function such as media planning and buying, while others may focus on a part of the process such as digital marketing. The size and scope of the agency will dictate the type of managers required.

The media is another large part of the advertising ecosystem. Media properties, whether it be large digital media companies like Google or Facebook, or broadcast companies such as Disney or out-of-home companies such as Clear Channel Communications, all depend on advertising as their revenue source. Their management structure reflects the need to build an audience and people to generate revenue based on the same.

The fourth big area of advertising is specialty companies that serve various niche aspects of the advertising industry. This includes many creative content makers such as film producers, graphic designers, photographers and digital artists. It also includes niche companies such as trade shows, events and app producers. These companies all require management to organize their activities.

Management titles and structures

How a company is owned has a big impact on management. There are two basic types of ownership structures.

• Privately owned companies dominate the landscape of advertising agencies, smaller advertisers and smaller niche companies. A privately owned company may be owned by a single person or a group of people. A privately owned or held company is usually structured as a limited liability...