Effective Advertising Strategies for Your Business

Cong Li

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781606498682
• eBook ISBN: 9781606498699
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

As the media landscape has evolved over the past fewyears, especially with the emergence of interactive andsocial media, the philosophy of advertising is significantlychanging. Most businesses realize that the dayswhen they relied on three national networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) and a few national newspapers to advertise aregone; thus, they begin to find alternatives to standardizedadvertising. Many of them begin to adopt moreindividualized advertising approaches, empowered byInternet technologies.This book outlines three fundamental strategies of advertising: standardized, targeted, and individualized. Itdescribes each strategy in detail and discusses the prosand cons of each. The importance of collecting consumerinsights and incorporating those insights into advertisingmessages are also highlighted. Although a few high-technologycompanies, such as Google, Facebook, andAmazon, are showing success in delivering individualizedadvertising messages to consumers, this approach (includingboth personalization and customization) is not suitablefor all businesses. No single strategy is absolutely moreeffective than the others; however, inside you are given areal strategy based on a scrutiny of the value proposition ofthe business and expectations of consumers.

Chapter 1

How Does Advertising Function in General?

This opening chapter broadly describes the philosophies and practices in the advertising world. It also explains several key terminologies widely used in the advertising industry. Specifically, it answers the following questions:

• How is advertising commonly defined?

• How has the Internet changed the advertising business in general?

• Why is advertising a combination of strategic thinking and creative work?

• How should an advertising campaign be executed?

• How should an advertising campaign’s effectiveness be ­measured?

What Exactly Is Advertising?

Traditional Definition

Since this book explains how to select and implement an effective advertising strategy, the first thing that I need to do is to define what advertising is or what, in my opinion, advertising really means. This is not an easy task, at least it is not as easy as it sounds. The truth of the matter is this: Most people encounter hundreds or even thousands of commercial messages per day, and the definition of advertising is largely subject to each person’s individual experience. As seen in an article published in the Journal of Advertising,1 numerous definitions of advertising, given by different textbooks, dictionaries, trade organizations, and government agencies exist. It is unbelievably difficult to reach a consensus on what advertising really is, even among those experts who practice or teach advertising for their living.

The major problem of defining advertising is that advertising shares some common characteristics with other forms of marketing communication, such as sales promotion, direct marketing, and public relations. To make a clean and clear distinction between each of these activities is quite challenging. I don’t believe that I have the talent to solve this problem, and it is probably unnecessary for me to add to the existing definitions and provide another one. However, it is worthwhile for me to explain how advertising is commonly defined in the field, and put my two cents in as to how it is related to this book.

An interesting question that I frequently get from my students in entry-level advertising courses is: Why are most advertising programs held in the communication school instead of the business school at a university? Intuitively, advertising sounds very business-oriented, doesn’t it? Well, yes, advertising is certainly a part of business operations. However, more importantly, in essence it is a type of communication. A classic way to describe communication is: Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect?2 If you think about this description, advertising indeed is communication. Most existing definitions of advertising actually reflect this nature and capture some or all of the following five elements: (1) create a paid message; (2) reach more than one person; (3) include an identified sponsor; (4) use mass media; and (5) persuade.3 In other words, advertising can be regarded as a paid communication process from an identified sponsor, using mass media to persuade or influence many people. Such a definition worked well for advertising practices before the Internet arrived. For example, a company pays for a television commercial on a national network and the advertising message gets delivered to many consumers who watch TV and who presumably will buy the product or service advertised. The Internet, however, is a game changer. Over the past two decades, the Internet has significantly changed how companies and consumers send and receive messages. As a result, the fundamental philosophy of how advertising works or should work has been altered.

New Meanings

If we further examine the five aforementioned elements that are typically attached to advertising, we can argue that at least three of them are not applicable anymore. First, media used to be categorized into two camps based on their functions: interpersonal media and mass media. The purpose of interpersonal media is to facilitate one-to-one communication. Examples of these media include telephones and letters. In contrast, mass media make one-to-many communication possible by sending messages to the mass. Conventional mass media, of course, refer to newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.

The Internet blurs the line between interpersonal media and mass media. Within an Internet environment, not only is one-to-one communication possible, but also there are one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many.4 Therefore, the Internet is a mixture of interpersonal media and mass media. From an advertising perspective, this feature is critical because it upends the basic logic of advertising which is that advertising messages should be paid and that they need to go through mass media and reach more than one person. The new understanding today is: (1) advertising may not be paid, (2) advertising may not go through mass media, and (3) advertising may not necessarily reach more than one person at one time.

A primary reason why communication scholars classify media into either interpersonal media or mass media is because mass media are subject to the so-called gatekeepers, while interpersonal media are not. For example, when you make a phone call or write a letter to another person, you are in full control of the message flow. There is no middle man in between you and the other party. That is not the case with mass media because ordinary people don’t have access to it. Consider a conventional mass medium, such as television. It is the gatekeepers, such as journalists, reporters, and editors who decide which messages get sent to the masses. If you want to have a voice there, you need to pay and your message is subject to scrutiny. Unfortunately, the price is high, especially when you are referring to some mass media with a national impact. I guess you know how expensive Super Bowl ads are. Yes, $4 million for 30 seconds!5 It’s crazy, but true. It’s a small wonder that most businesses cannot afford this type of luxury ads, but the good news is that the Internet provides every company opportunities to advertise for free or with little expense.

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are excellent examples to illustrate the point that the Internet has significantly changed the advertising world. When you set up your business account on Twitter, for instance, you are empowered to communicate with consumers in many different ways such as one-to-one (replying to an individual follower’s tweet) and one-to-many (posting a tweet for all followers). The beauty of this is: You are in control of the message exchange and you don’t pay big bucks to the media to do this for you. Thus, whatever messages you create on the Internet become advertising, no matter whether they go through your corporate website, social media account, or other platforms.

The purpose of my writing this book is not to teach you how to build an effective corporate website or on what social media platform you should set up a business account. Instead, I want to focus on the third change the Internet brings to advertising practices that I mentioned earlier: Advertising may not necessarily reach more than one person at one time. Traditionally, a common method for pricing an ad is based on how many people it is expected to reach. The more, the better. Now we know why Super Bowl ads are so expensive. Yes, over 100 million people are expected to watch the game!6 If you do the math, you will find out that you pay approximately four cents for each person potentially exposed to your ad, given that it costs you $4 million in total. It doesn’t look that expensive now, right? This is why many companies are eager to seek media vehicles that can help them reach as many people as possible and they are willing to pay for these media channels. Another reason is that many people believe advertising expense is a good indicator of marketing effort: The more money spent on advertising, the greater the effort—meaning that the company really has faith in the product so as to advertise it heavily.7

You don’t have $4 million to spend on advertising? Okay, don’t worry. The emergence of new media presents alternative ways to advertise. Instead of trying to reach a gigantic number of people with one shot, you can communicate with each individual consumer at one time. This type of communication is often termed as personalization or individualization.8 Such an idea of communicating with each individual consumer is not really new, but it is the Internet that makes such communications inexpensive and affordable. Many times these individualized communications are even more effective than advertising to the mass. One thing to note, however, is that I am not suggesting that individualized communication is always superior to other types of communication. In fact, in certain cases, it is not the ideal approach. In later chapters, I will lay out the fundamentals of three major advertising strategies and discuss when each of them is suitable for a business and should be adopted: (1) standardized, or talking to many consumers; (2) targeted, or talking to a group of consumers; and (3) individualized, or talking to each individual consumer. I will also elaborate on how advertising messages should be created based on each strategy and how to measure their effectiveness.

Two Sides of Advertising

Being Strategic

Advertising has two sides: strategy and creativity. Some people mistakenly think advertising is all about making things visually appealing and entertaining—this certainly is a misperception. Advertising does involve a great deal of creative work and certain software usage, but knowing how to use Photoshop or InDesign doesn’t necessarily mean that you are doing advertising in a correct way. An effective advertising campaign must be both strategic and creative.

From an operational standpoint, a typical full service advertising agency has four departments that perform different jobs: account management, account planning, creative development and production, and media planning and buying. Apparently, developing creative work is one function of an agency, among many. Specifically, people in the creative department, such as art directors and copywriters, are responsible for developing creative messages in a certain strategic direction. This direction is usually generated from consumer research conducted by account planners who work in the account planning department. Thus, developing ad messages is in fact a collaborative process between strategy and creativity.

The history of incorporating both sides (strategy and creativity) in advertising goes back to the 1960s. In the old days, strategy didn’t play a critical role in the advertising world. Many advertising campaigns were developed and implemented without knowing much who the target audiences were and what they wanted. The concept of account planning that advertising messages need to reflect consumer insights was originated in the UK by two advertising agencies (JWT and BMP) in the late 1960s.9 In 1981, this idea was introduced to the United States and made its debut at an agency in New York (Chiat\Day).10 Today, it has been widely recognized and adopted in advertising communities across the world.11

In its formative years in the UK, account planning was considered as a response to the need to understand changing consumer cultures.12 The most critical function of account planning, therefore, is to apply knowledge and understanding of consumers to the devel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Abstract
• Contents
• Chapter 1 How Does Advertising Function in General?
• Chapter 2 What Are the Three Advertising Strategies?
• Chapter 3 How Does Standardized Advertising Strategy Work?
• Chapter 4 How Does Targeted Advertising Strategy Work?
• Chapter 5 How Does Individualized Advertising Strategy Work?
• Chapter 6 How to Gather Consumer Insights for Advertising?
• Chapter 7 How to Incorporate Consumer Insights Into Advertising?
• Chapter 8 How to Integrate Different Advertising Strategies Together?
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Ad Page
• Backcover