Assignment: Social Marketing Assignment

advertising 

The main purpose of advertising is the promotion of ideas, goods or services, or any combination of these, that are paid for by an identifiable sponsor. Advertising is among the most visible, most expensive and most controversial of the elements and techniques of marketing communications. Bruce Barton , the legendary advertising executive who helped develop the image of General Motors in the 1920s, said that ‘the role of advertising is to help corporations to find their soul’. The media philosopher, Marshall McLuhan , called it the art form of the 20th century. Advertising has attracted artists, intellectuals, movie directors, politicians, poets, hard-headed businessmen…and controversy.

One of the dominant techniques of persuasion and selling in the last century, advertising is now changing in nature, purpose, and form. Advertising content was historically directed through mass media to achieve agreed marketing objectives. The relationship between media channels and advertising is a symbiotic one in which the nature of the media channel has always been a major determining factor in the development and diffusion of advertising content. The economics of media channels are dependent upon revenues from advertising. The proliferation of new media channels, together with the rise of the World Wide Web , is the greatest force of change that is bearing down on the advertising industry. Nowadays, there is a greater multiplicity and fragmentation of media channels that can be used for advertising. Traditional media channels have now been challenged by new media channels. This gives a significantly different advertising media mix, including radio, the press, magazines, posters, brochures and catalogues, telephone, the World Wide Web, broadcast satellite and cable channels, physical objects, apparel, and interactive digital television. New media, such as the World Wide Web, have started a revolution in creative advertising development, distribution, and audience feedback and interaction. New media have also vastly increased consumer choice and consumers' ability to select and customize in receiving information and images. Consequently, this affects the ability of advertising to gain attention and then to persuade audiences to act.

Although advertising can be traced back to the earliest times, making use of all media and visual aids available to it at the time, it has always been a much-debated topic. The role of early 20th-century advertising was to shift products in an age of mass production; later, it became a way of changing public opinion, lifestyles and consumer habit. In more recent times it has fuelled the ‘personality’ of brands and become something of an art form in its own right. One of the more enduring criticisms of advertising, both as a marketing discipline and as an industry, is its lack of financial accountability and uneven effectiveness. Great minds have been consumed in developing incontrovertible formulas that will one day show exactly how many sales emerge from each advertising campaign. In an age that likes to have measurable results and analyses for every type of business investment, advertising remains difficult to assess and quantify with agreed metrics. It is both emotional and rational, both an entertainment and a way of conveying information.

Few doubt that advertising is crucial to economic development, market competition, and dynamism. It is most prevalent in economies with the highest standards of living (for example the United States spends roughly three times as much on advertising as the next largest spenders, Japan and India).

It has also been argued that advertising helps to promote and diffuse innovation throughout society and to give stimulus to new product development. Many of the great modern inventions—such as cars, telephones, cameras, record players, air travel, electrical appliances, and computers—were initially promoted through advertising. Because advertising is essentially the consequence of market competition, it can also contribute to lower prices and the prevention of monopoly . Beyond that, advertising also provides a means by which information on products and issues of interest to society are diffused. It can be an entertainment in its own right (some directors and actors have started their careers in advertising) and it can be used in the promotion of cities, countries, regions, charities, causes, political manifestos, and environmental issues.

Types of advertising

1. 1 Institutional or corporate advertising, also known as Image advertising, which promotes an organization's brand, image, people, capabilities, employment opportunities, ideas, or political issues, or anything that the advertiser wants to publicize.

2. 2 Product and services advertising promotes specific goods and services to target audiences.

3. 3 Location advertising is advertising by communities, states, cities, or destinations; for example, the ‘I Love New York’ or ‘Glasgow Smiles Better’ campaigns were designed to attract tourists and businesses and to revitalize the images of these once maligned cities.

4. 4 Classified advertising is for the sale of goods, services, jobs between individuals, usually in smaller locations, without display, in newspapers. It is a $50 bn global market. See media channels for display methods used in advertising.

Purposes of advertising

Advertising is used for different purposes, among which are:

1. 1 Promotion of the value of products and services, which has tended to be dominated by advertising of consumer products.

2. 2 Promotion of ideas, organizations, and causes. These techniques have also been used in one-party states for political and social purposes, or to ‘enlighten’ captive populations.

3. 3 Increasing the use of existing products and services. This can also be referred to as category brand advertising, especially when a product or service is already well known and repeat purchase is the goal.

4. 4 Reinforcement or extension of existing brand recognition, awareness, value, and esteem. For example, this is often used when a brand has become ‘tired’, or subject to declining awareness, or needs to be repositioned in the minds of target audiences, or positioned for the first time in the minds of new audiences.

5. 5 Building a new brand from zero, in which case the goal of advertising is rapid recognition and awareness building for the new brand.

6. 6 Acceleration of revenue, sales growth, or number of buyers—in which case advertising can be more directly measured as a contributor to sales. For example, BT could instantly measure the effect of its television advertising by the number of additional calls over and above the norm that were made during and immediately after its famous advertising campaigns.

7. 7 Increasing total market share—in which case advertising supports other elements of the marketing mix in order to increase share relative to competition.

8. 8 Reaching new markets and buyers—particularly important when entering a new market or country or in expanding the market for an existing product or service.

9. 9 Influencing buying decisions—in which case advertising works on the practicalities of moving buyers to make favourable buying decisions for the product or service that is being advertised. This type of advertising is usually characterized by practical information copy rather than advanced concepts.

10. 10 Increasing sales and supporting sales functions.

11. 11 Developing customer loyalty. This is related to number 4, but may also be used when customer loyalty is threatened by a competing product or service.

12. 12 Announcing a new offer or sales promotion. This is related to number 5, but may also provide a ‘kicker’ to a well-established product range.

13. 13 Announcing a product price or service change.

14. 14 Announcing a company vision, mission or values, or a new company. This is related to number 4.

15. 15 Announcing a merger of two or more companies. This includes practical information, but usually starts to announce the purpose and values of the new entity.

16. 16 Educating existing customers or new customers and audiences.

17. 17 Attacking or counteracting competition or competitor advertising. This type of advertising used to be banned and even today is used in limited doses. Examples are the battle for the British business traveller waged between Virgin Atlantic and British Airways, or for the Cola drinker between Coke and Pepsi.

18. 18 Making a formal statement or supplying direct information to the public. This is where advertising and public relations merge.

19. 19 Recruiting people for a company, organization, or institution.

20. 20 Correction of an advertised claim that has been found by a regulatory body to be deceptive.

21. 21 Promotion of a product or service under the guise of a learned detached copy or programme: known as advertorial in print or infomercials on broadcast media.

Elements of Advertising

Advertising research

The creative development research in which the advertising concept's appropriateness for the market and its target audience is researched. This is usually conducted prior to a full-blown advertising campaign. Pre-production Research Testing involves pre-testing the concept and creative work with representative audience samples and panels. This is usually done before and during a campaign. Post-production Research Testing studies overall reactions after the advertising campaign has run, which contributes to the effectiveness measure. See also advertising research ; market research .

Regulation of advertising

An activity that is done within a national context and is rooted in the cultural, legal, and social interpretations of fairness, integrity, honesty, and truth in advertising in the particular country. Each country has different nuances and regulation of advertising standards. For example, some countries allow unsubstantiated claims for certain products (such as ‘product X improves your health’) whereas others do not. Some countries allow the use of the superlative (as in ‘Product X is the best product in the world’) while others do not. For example, in the UK the beer company Carlsberg had to moderate its claim to be ‘the best lager in the world’ with ‘probably’.

The advent of Internet-based advertising has also presented regulatory authorities with a range of challenges. There is, as yet, no universally guaranteed way of regulating Internet-based advertising or enforcing penalties against illegal advertising. The regulation of promotion activities is largely based on self-regulatory codes of practice rather than statutory law as there is no one act which covers the entire range of promotional activities. There are no internationally agreed laws on consumer protection, competition, and monopoly that can be applied to cyberspace. For example, one of the most exposed areas in the short term is the whole system of quality assurance and control standards of goods and services advertised on the Internet. Goods and services promoted then ordered over the Internet from another country could circumvent the apparatus of quality controls. Quality and safety are national variables. For example, drugs which may be over-the-counter in one country may be available only by prescription in another. The patient may be able to see them advertised on the Internet, then order them remotely and receive them through the mail, thereby bypassing the local regulations and controls. Digitally distributed content, such as software for example, or the Internet's most advertised product, pornography, could be accepted in one country and offensive or banned in another. There is no standards body to arbitrate over misleading or inaccurate advertising.

Agency self-regulation is self-policing by the advertising industry, which may include ethical issues, certification, standards, and reviews and recommendations by the industry-policing bodies regarding allegedly deceptive or fraudulent advertising.

Advertising measurement and effectiveness

The several methods of measuring the effectiveness of advertising, which is often referred to as the ROAI, or rate of return on advertising investment. The measurement of advertising effectiveness is a perennial source of controversy and has always cast a shadow of doubt on the effectiveness of the advertising industry.

· • Pre-testing of advertising is a way of testing how effective it can be prior to full launch, usually involving test groups assessing impact, emotional reaction, communication, image, recall, and originality.

· • Post-test evaluation of advertising, which may involve a customer survey, recall tests (in which each respondent or test group is asked about what advertisements he or she has seen recently), and recognition tests (in which each respondent or test group is shown the actual advertisement and asked if they recognize or recall it and what it meant to them). This is often divided into tests of aided and unaided recall. In aided recall the test group is prompted with cues or lists of the adverts or brand attributes; in the unaided this is not done.

· • Sales testing is testing to determine the actual sales or order growth that resulted from the advertising campaign. This is a more difficult type of test because, generally, advertising works more on perception in the customer's mind than on immediate purchase action. It could include sales in total, by customer, or sales by product or service contribution or, in total, by customer and by product and service. It may include a measure of the impact of the campaign on actual expenses versus budgeted expenses on the basis that good advertising ought to lower sales costs. It may measure the number of new leads, or potential customer interests resulting and, ultimately, the number of new customers obtained. It may be a simpler measure of percentage increase in sales after the advertising campaign compared with the period before the advertising campaign.

· • Public reaction testing aims to determine the overall effectiveness of the campaign by, for example, measuring the amount of media space gained, and the number of articles and favourable comments written and made about the campaign.

· • Offer redemption refers to the uptake of a special offer promoted in the advertising (such as a discounted product, a special package or deal, a coupon in which the way of reclaiming it is embedded in the advertisement) where the redemption or interest in the offer can be measured directly. See also dagmar ; dar .

www.adage.com Website on advertising

http://www.hatads.org.uk/ History of classic British advertising on an online