Major Advertising Decisions
Setting Advertising Objectives
The first step is to set advertising objectives. These objectives should be based on past decisions about the target market, positioning, and the marketing mix, which define the job that advertising must do in the total marketing program. The overall advertising objective is to help engage customers and build customer relationships by communicating customer value. Here, we discuss specific advertising objectives.
An advertising objective is a specific communication task to be accomplished with a specific target audience during a specific period of time. Advertising objectives can be classified by their primary purpose—to inform, persuade, or remind.
Table 15.1 lists examples of each of these specific objectives.
Table 15.1
Possible Advertising Objectives
Informative advertising is used heavily when introducing a new product category. In this case, the objective is to build primary demand. Thus, early producers of big-screen HDTVs first had to inform consumers of the image quality and size benefits of the new product. Persuasive advertising becomes more important as competition increases. Here, the company’s objective is to build selective demand. For example, once HDTVs became established, Samsung began trying to persuade consumers that its brand offered the best quality for their money. Such advertising wants to engage customers and create brand community.
Some persuasive advertising has become comparative advertising (or attack advertising), in which a company directly or indirectly compares its brand with one or more other brands. You see examples of comparative advertising in almost every product category, ranging from soft drinks and fast food to car rentals, credit cards, and wireless phone services. For example, Pepsi has long fielded comparative ads that take direct aim at rival Coca-Cola:4
Comparative advertising: Pepsi has long taken direct aim at rival Coca-Cola with comparative ads. “There are few things that grab our fans’ attention as much as seeing our beloved blue and that red next to each other,” says a Pepsi marketer.
PepsiCo
It began years ago with the long-running “Pepsi Challenge” campaign, where Pepsi ads showed blind taste tests in shopping malls and other public places in which consumers invariably preferred the taste of Pepsi to that of Coca-Cola.
Comparative advertising campaigns often create controversy. Many times, that’s the point of using them. Whereas established market leaders want to exclude other brands from the consumer’s choice set, challengers want to shake things up, inject their brands into the consumer conversation, and put themselves on equal footing with the leader. For example, Microsoft has a long history of successful comparative advertising, both in initiating challenges against market-leading rivals and fending off attacks by challengers (see Real Marketing 15.1).
Still, advertisers should use comparative advertising with caution. All too often, such ads invite competitor responses, resulting in an advertising war that neither competitor can win. Upset competitors might also take more drastic action, such as filing complaints with the self-regulatory National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus or even filing false-advertising lawsuits. Consider the reactions of competitors to recent comparative ads by Chobani:
One Chobani Simply 100 yogurt ad shows a woman scrutinizing the label on a container of Yoplait Greek 100 yogurt and promptly discarding it as the ad voiceover says, “Potassium sorbate? Really? That stuff is used to kill bugs.” The ad concludes by noting that Chobani Simply 100 Greek yogurt contains zero preservatives. Another ad portrays a woman sitting poolside tossing a container of Dannon Light and Fit into the trash as a voiceover declares, “Sucralose, why? That stuff has chlorine added to it. Chobani Simply 100 is the only 100-calorie yogurt sweetened naturally.” Competitors didn’t take kindly to the jabs. Yoplait maker General Mills filed a lawsuit against Chobani for misleading advertising. And Dannon’s lawyers sent Chobani a cease-and-desist letter asking it to discontinue the campaign. In turn, Chobani sued Dannon asking the courts to confirm that Chobani’s advertising is not misleading. Only time will tell how it all turns out. But the skirmishes aren’t likely to benefit any of the competitors.5
Reminder advertising is important for mature products; it helps to maintain customer relationships and keep consumers thinking about the product. For example, a recent ad campaign for Silk soymilk tells consumers to “Fall back in love with Soymilk,” reminding them of the many reasons that “Silk helps you bloom.” Expensive Coca-Cola television ads primarily build and maintain the Coca-Cola brand relationship rather than inform consumers or persuade them to buy it in the short run.
Advertising’s goal is to help move consumers through the buying process. Some advertising is designed to move people to immediate action. For example, a direct-response television ad by Weight Watchers urges consumers to go online and sign up right away, and a Best Buy newspaper insert for a weekend sale encourages immediate store visits. However, many ads focus on building or strengthening long-term customer relationships. For example, a Nike television ad in which well-known athletes work through extreme challenges in their Nike gear never directly asks for a sale. Instead, the goal is to engage customers and somehow change the way they think or feel about the brand.
Setting the Advertising Budget
After determining its advertising objectives, the company next sets its advertising budget for each product. Four commonly used methods for setting promotion budgets are discussed in Chapter 14. Here we discuss some specific factors that should be considered when setting the advertising budget.
A brand’s advertising budget often depends on its stage in the product life cycle. For example, new products typically need relatively large advertising budgets to build awareness and to gain consumer trial. In contrast, mature brands usually require lower budgets as a ratio to sales. Also, brands in a market with many competitors and high advertising clutter must be advertised more heavily to be noticed above the noise in the marketplace. Undifferentiated brands—those that closely resemble other brands in their product class (soft drinks, laundry detergents)—may require heavy advertising to set them apart. When the product differs greatly from those of competitors, advertising can be used to point out the differences to consumers.
No matter what method is used, setting the advertising budget is no easy task. How does a company know if it is spending the right amount? Companies such as Coca-Cola and Kraft have built sophisticated statistical models to determine the relationship between promotional spending and brand sales and to help determine the “optimal investment” across various media. Still, because so many factors affect advertising effectiveness, some controllable and others not, measuring the results of advertising spending remains an inexact science. In most cases, managers must rely on large doses of judgment along with more quantitative analysis when setting advertising budgets.
As a result of such thinking, advertising is one of the easiest budget items to cut when economic times get tough. Cuts in brand-building advertising appear to do little short-term harm to sales. In the long run, however, slashing ad spending may cause long-term damage to a brand’s image and market share. In fact, companies that can maintain or even increase their advertising spending while competitors are decreasing theirs can gain competitive advantage.
For example, during the Great Recession, while competitors were cutting back, car maker Audi actually increased its marketing and advertising spending. Audi “kept its foot on the pedal while everyone else [was] pulling back,” said an Audi ad executive. “Why would we go backwards now when the industry is generally locking the brakes and cutting spending?” As a result, Audi’s brand awareness and buyer consideration reached record levels during the recession, outstripping those of BMW, Mercedes, and Lexus and positioning Audi strongly for the post-recession era. Audi is now one of the hottest auto brands on the market, neck and neck with BMW and Mercedes in global luxury car sales.6
Developing Advertising Strategy
Advertising strategy consists of two major elements: creating advertising messages and selecting advertising media. In the past, companies often viewed media planning as secondary to the message-creation process. After the creative department created good advertisements, the media department then selected and purchased the best media for carrying those advertisements to the desired target audiences. This often caused friction between creatives and media planners.
Today, however, soaring media costs, more-focused target marketing strategies, and the blizzard of new online, mobile, and social media have promoted the importance of the media-planning function. The decision about which media to use for an ad campaign—television, newspapers, magazines, video, a website, social media, mobile devices, or email—is now sometimes more critical than the creative elements of the campaign. Also, brand content is now often co-created through interactions with and among consumers. As a result, more and more advertisers are orchestrating a closer harmony between their messages and the media that deliver them. As discussed in the previous chapter, thegoal is to create and manage brand content across a full range of media, whether they are paid, owned, earned, or shared.
Creating the Advertising Message and Brand Content
No matter how big the budget, advertising can succeed only if it engages consumers and communicates well. Good advertising messages and content are especially important in today’s costly and cluttered advertising environment.
Today, the average U.S. household receives about 190 TV channels and consumers have more than 7,200 magazines from which to choose.7 Add in the countless radio stations and a continuous barrage of catalogs, direct mail, out-of-home media, email, and online, mobile, and social media exposures, and consumers are being bombarded with ads and brand content at home, work, and all points in between. For example, Americans are exposed to a cumulative 5.3 trillion online ad impressions each year and a daily diet of 500 million tweets, 4 billion YouTube videos, 58 million photos shared on Instagram, 5 million article pins on Pinterest, and 4.75 billion pieces of shared content on Facebook.8
Breaking Through the Clutter
If all this clutter bothers some consumers, it also causes huge headaches for marketers. Take the situation facing network television advertisers. They pay an average of $342,000 to produce a single 30-second commercial. Then each time they show it, they pay an average of $112,100 for 30 seconds of advertising time during a popular primetime program. They pay even more if it’s an especially popular program, such as Sunday Night Football ($803,000), Empire ($497,000), Big Bang Theory ($348,000), or a mega-event such as the Super Bowl (averaging $5 million per 30 seconds!). Then their ads are sandwiched in with a clutter of other commercials, network promotions, and other nonprogram material totaling as much as 20 minutes per primetime hour, with long commercial breaks coming every six minutes on average. Such clutter in television and other ad media has created an increasingly hostile advertising environment.9
Advertising clutter: Today’s consumers, armed with an arsenal of technologies, can choose what they watch and don’t watch. Increasingly, they are choosing not to watch ads.
Piotr Marcinski/Shutterstock
It used to be that television viewers were pretty much a captive audience for advertisers. But today’s digital wizardry has given viewers a rich new set of information and entertainment options—the internet, video streaming, social and mobile media, tablets and smartphones, and others.
Digital technology has also armed consumers with an arsenal of technologies for choosing what they watch or don’t watch and when. Increasingly, thanks to the growth of DVR systems and digital streaming, consumers are choosing not to watch ads.
Thus, advertisers can no longer force-feed the same old cookie-cutter messages and content to captive consumers through traditional media. Simply interrupting or disrupting consumers no longer works. Unless ads provide content that is engaging, useful, or entertaining, many consumers will simply ignore or skip them.
Merging Advertising and Entertainment
To break through the clutter, many marketers have subscribed to a new merging of advertising and entertainment, dubbed “Madison & Vine.” You’ve probably heard of Madison Avenue, the New York City street that houses the headquarters of many of the nation’s largest advertising agencies. You may also have heard of Hollywood & Vine, the intersection of Hollywood Avenue and Vine Street in Hollywood, California, long the symbolic heart of the U.S. entertainment industry. Now, Madison Avenue and Hollywood & Vine have come together to form a new intersection—Madison & Vine—that represents the merging of advertising and entertainment in an effort to create new avenues for reaching consumers with more engaging messages.
This merging of advertising and entertainment takes one of two forms: advertainment or brand integrations. The aim of advertainment is to make ads and brand content themselves so entertaining or so useful that people want to watch them. There’s no chance that you’d watch ads on purpose, you say? Think again. For example, the Super Bowl has become an annual advertainment showcase. Tens of millions of people tune in to the Super Bowl each year, as much to watch the entertaining ads as to see the game. And ads and related content posted online before and after the big game draw tens of millions of views. These days, it’s common to see an entertaining ad on YouTube long before you see it on TV.
Advertisers are also creating content forms that look less like ads and more like short films or shows. A range of brand messaging platforms—from webisodes and blogs to online videos and social media posts—now blur the line between ads and other consumer content. For example, as part of its long-running, highly successful Campaign for Real Beauty, Unilever’s Dove brand has created numerous long-form ad videos about how women of all ages view themselves. Its “Real Beauty Sketches” video compared images of women drawn by an FBI-trained sketch artist based on their self-descriptions versus strangers’ descriptions of them. Side-by-side comparisons show that the stranger-described images are invariably more accurate and more flattering, creating strong reactions from the women. The tagline concludes, “You’re more beautiful than you think.” Although the award-winning video was never shown on TV, it drew more than 163 million global YouTube views within just two months, making it the most-watched video ever. Other blockbuster Dove Real Beauty videos—with titles such as “Evolution” and “Change One Thing”—have met with similar receptions.10
Marketers have tested all kinds of novel ways to break through today’s clutter and engage consumers. For example, Hostess Brands—maker of those yummy Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, and cream-filled cupcakes—recently shared a tweet celebrating the opening day of the Major League Baseball season. The tweet contained a picture of baseball-decorated cupcakes but also the bold headline TOUCHDOWN. As expected, the tweet grabbed plenty of attention, as droves of Twitter followers pounced to point out the mistake, just the reaction Hostess intended. “The ‘touchdown’ line was intentional,” says the marketing director of Hostess Brands. “It’s fun and aimed at young audiences who are in on the running joke.”
Other brands have also “tested the stupid waters,” as one analyst puts it. For example, JCPenney once posted incoherent tweets, grabbing widespread attention and leading to speculation that the retailer’s social media person was either drunk or had been hacked. Instead, says JCPenney, the person was tweeting with mittens on to promote its winter merchandise. P&G’s Charmin brand’s #tweetfromtheseat Twitter campaign uses irreverent humor to create engagement and drive buzz, with questions such as “Charmin asks: What are your thoughts on streaming while streaming?” and “There’s no toilet paper left on the roll, do you yell for help, wiggle and air dry, text someone for help?”11
Brand integrations (or branded entertainment) involve making the brand an inseparable part of some other form of entertainment or content. The most common form of brand integration is product placements—embedding brands as props within other programming. It might be a brief glimpse of Starbucks coffee products on Morning Joe on MSNBC or of Microsoft’s Surface tablet and Bing search engine in episodes of Elementary or Arrow. It could be scenes from Avengers: Age of Ultron in which Black Widow rides a Harley-Davidson Livewire.
Or the product placement might be scripted into a movie or an episode of a TV show. For example, a GoPro camera played a starring role opposite Matt Damon in the movie The Martian. And a three-episode story on the hit TV show Empire was built entirely around the making of a Pepsi commercial in which the character of Jamal, a rising singer, becomes the new face of Pepsi. Then Pepsi ran the actual ad during commercial breaks in subsequent episodes of the show. The Empire brand integration cost Pepsi an estimated $20 million.12
Branded integration: A entire storyline in one episode of Black-ish was built around a Buick Encore, which characters Dre and Bow purchased for their daughter, Zoey.
Ron Batzdorff/Getty Images
Similarly, a storyline in one episode of Black-ish was built around a Buick Encore, which characters Dre and Bow purchased for their daughter, Zoey. Dre lists all of the great features of the Enclave. However, after his work colleagues remind him of the riskier things teenagers do to and in cars, Dre has second thoughts about whether Zoey is really ready for a car. Dre’s mother, Ruby, feeds his concerns so that she can claim the car for her own. Ruby even posts a selfie with the car on her Facebook page, proclaiming, “Praise Jesus. That son of mine finally got his mother a Buick.” By the end of the episode, Zoey gets the car. Other Black-ish episodes feature storylines built around brands ranging State Farm to Chipotle.
Originally created with TV in mind, brand integration has spread quickly into other sectors of the entertainment industry. If you look carefully, you’ll see product placements in movies, video games, comic books, Broadway musicals, and even pop music. For example, last year’s top 31 movies contained 430 identifiable brand placements.13 The highly acclaimed film The LEGO Movie was pretty much a 100-minute product placement for iconic LEGO construction bricks. According to one writer, “The audience happily sits through a cinematic sales pitch . . . that shows off the immense versatility of the product while placing it in a deeply personal context. The majority of the film is a breathtaking display of what LEGO bricks are capable of as creative tools, but the personal element is what really elevates this film to product-placement perfection.” The LEGO Movie boosted The LEGO Group’s sales by 13 percent the year after it opened.14
A related form of brand integration is so-called native advertising (also called sponsored content), advertising or other brand-produced online content that appears to be “native to” the web or social media site in which it is placed. That is, the brand content looks in form and function like the other natural content surrounding it on a web or social media platform. It might be an article on a website such as The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Mashable, or even The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal that is paid for, written by, and placed by an advertiser but uses the same format as articles written by the editorial staff. Or it might be brand-prepared videos, pictures, posts, or pages integrated into social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter that match the form and feel of native content on those media. Examples include Twitter’s promoted tweets, Facebook’s promoted stories, BuzzFeed’s sponsored posts, or Snapchat’s “brand story” ads, branded posts that appear in the app’s “Stories” feed. Native advertising is an increasingly popular form of brand content. It lets advertisers create relevant associations between brand and consumer content. According to a recent study by the Association of National Advertisers, “given today’s media landscape, where consumers can avoid ads more than ever, advertisers are looking for new ways to get their messages noticed and acted upon.”15
Thus, Madison & Vine is now the meeting place for advertising, brand content, and entertainment. The goal is to make brand messages a part of the broader flow of consumer content and conversation rather than an intrusion or interruption of it. As advertising agency JWT puts it, “We believe advertising needs to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” However, advertisers must be careful that the new intersection itself doesn’t become too congested. With all the new brand content formats and integration, Madison & Vine threatens to create even more of the very clutter that it was designed to break through. At that point, consumers might decide to take yet a different route.
Message and Content Strategy
The first step in creating effective advertising content is to plan a message strategy—the general message that will be communicated to consumers. The purpose of advertising is to get consumers to engage with or react to the product or company in a certain way. People will engage and react only if they believe they will benefit from doing so. Thus, developing an effective message strategy begins with identifying customer benefits that can be used as advertising appeals. Ideally, the message strategy will follow directly from the company’s broader positioning and customer value–creation strategies.
Message strategy statements tend to be plain, straightforward outlines of benefits and positioning points that the advertiser wants to stress. The advertiser must next develop a compelling creative concept—or big idea—that will bring the message strategy to life in a distinctive and memorable way. At this stage, simple message ideas become great ad campaigns. Usually, a copywriter and an art director will team up to generate many creative concepts, hoping that one of these concepts will turn out to be the big idea. The creative concept may emerge as a visualization, a phrase, or a combination of the two.
The creative concept will guide the choice of specific appeals to be used in an advertising campaign. Advertising appeals should have three characteristics. First, they should be meaningful, pointing out benefits that make the product more desirable or interesting to consumers. Second, appeals must be believable. Consumers must believe that the product or service will deliver the promised benefits.
Distinctive advertising appeals: GE sets its Café refrigerator apart as one that gives users an in-the-door filtered hot water dispenser and Keurig® K-Cup® single-serve brewing system. It’s creating “a new way to brew.”
Courtesy of Haier US Appliance Solutions, Inc and Keurig Green Mountain Inc.
However, the most meaningful and believable benefits may not be the best ones to feature. Appeals should also be distinctive. They should tell how the product is better than competing brands. For example, the most meaningful benefit of a refrigerator is that it keeps foods cold.
But GE sets its Café refrigerator apart as one that gives users an in-the-door filtered hot water dispenser and a Keurig® K-Cup® single-serve brewing system for making cups of coffee, tea, and other hot beverages at the fridge. It’s “a new way to brew.” Similarly, the most meaningful benefit of owning a wristwatch is that it keeps accurate time, yet few watch ads feature this benefit. Instead, watch advertisers might select any of a number of advertising themes. For years, Timex has been the affordable watch that “takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” In contrast, Rolex ads talk about the brand’s “obsession with perfection” and the fact that “Rolex has been the preeminent symbol of performance and prestige for more than a century.”
Message Execution
The advertiser now must turn the big idea into an actual ad execution that will capture the target market’s attention and interest. The creative team must find the best approach, style, tone, words, and format for executing the message. The message can be presented in various execution styles, such as the following:
Slice of life. This style shows one or more “typical” people using the product in a normal setting. For example, IKEA content—from microsites and Instagram posts to print ads and television commercials—features people living in rooms furnished with IKEA furniture and household goods.
Lifestyle. This style shows how a product fits in with a particular lifestyle. For example, an ad for Athleta activewear shows a woman in a complex yoga pose and states: “If your body is your temple, build it one piece at a time.”
Fantasy. This style creates a fantasy around the product or its use. For example, a Calvin Klein “Drive in to Fantasy” ad shows a woman floating blissfully above a surf-strewn beach at sunset in her Calvin Klein Nightwear.
Mood or image. This style builds a mood or image around the product or service, such as beauty, love, intrigue, serenity, or pride. Few claims are made about the product or service except through suggestion. For example, a tear-inducing Budweiser “Lost Dog” commercial portrayed a little lost puppy that was rescued from a hungry wolf by his pals the Budweiser Clydesdales. The ad tugged effectively at heartstrings and topped the ad charts during Super Bowl XLIX while saying nothing about the taste or other qualities of Budweiser beer.
Musical. This style shows people or cartoon characters singing about the product. For example, the M&M’s “Love Ballad” ad, part of the Better with M campaign, featured Red singing Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love,” showcasing his commitment to actress Naya Rivera. Red has second thoughts, however, when Rivera can’t resist adding Red to some of her favorite treats, including cookies, cake, and ice cream. To all of that, Red answers with the lyric, “But I won’t do that . . . or that . . . or that . . . or that.”
Personality symbol. This style creates a character that represents the product. The character might be animated (Mr. Clean, the GEICO Gecko, or the Pillsbury Doughboy) or real (perky Progressive Insurance spokeswoman Flo, Dos Equis beer’s “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” or Ronald McDonald).
Technical expertise. This style shows the company’s expertise in making the product. Thus, Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Company tells about his many years of experience in brewing Samuel Adams beer.
Scientific evidence. This style presents survey or scientific evidence that the brand is better or better liked than one or more other brands. For years, Crest toothpaste has used scientific evidence to convince buyers that Crest is better than other brands at fighting cavities.
Testimonial evidence or endorsement. This style features a highly believable or likable source endorsing the product. It could be ordinary people saying how much they like a given product. For example, Whole Foods features a variety of real customers in its Values Matter marketing campaign. Or it might be a celebrity presenting the product, such as Taylor Swift for Diet Coke or NBA star Stephen Curry for Under Armour.
The advertiser also must choose a tone for the ad. For example, P&G always uses a positive tone: Its ads say something very positive about its products. Other advertisers now use edgy humor to break through the commercial clutter. Doritos commercials are famous for this.
The advertiser must use memorable and attention-getting words in the ad. For example, rather than just saying that its prescription sunglass lenses protect your eyes and look good at the same time, a LensCrafters ad announces, “Sunblock Never Looked So Good.” Rather than claiming that “a BMW is a well-engineered automobile,” BMW uses more creative and higher-impact phrasing: “The ultimate driving machine.” And instead of stating plainly that Hanes socks last longer than less expensive ones, Hanes suggests, “Buy cheap socks and you’ll pay through the toes.”
Novel formats can make an advertisement stand out: In this Sherwin-Williams ad, the eye-catching illustration delivers the bulk of the “Where will color take you?” message.
The Sherwin-Williams Company
Finally, format elements make a difference in an ad’s impact as well as in its cost. A small change in an ad’s design can make a big difference in its effect. In a print or display ad, the illustration is the first thing the reader notices—it must be strong enough to draw attention. Next, the headline must effectively entice the right people to read the copy. Finally, the copy—the main block of text in the ad—must be simple but strong and convincing. Moreover, these three elements must effectively work together to engage customers and persuasively present customer value. However, novel formats can help an ad stand out from the clutter.
For example, in recent ads for Sherwin-Williams paint, eye-catching illustrations—featuring dazzling colors and unique designs—capture attention and deliver the bulk of the message. Once the illustrations engage the reader, small-print headlines ask, “Where will color take you?” while a familiar Sherwin-Williams “Cover the Earth” logo identifies the brand.
Consumer-Generated Content
Taking advantage of today’s digital and social media technologies, many companies are now tapping consumers for marketing content, message ideas, or even actual ads and videos. Sometimes the results are outstanding; sometimes they are forgettable. If done well, however, user-generated content can incorporate the voice of the customer into brand messages and generate greater customer engagement.
Perhaps the best-known consumer-generated content effort is the former “Crash the Super Bowl Challenge” held annually by PepsiCo’s Doritos brand. For more than a decade, Doritos invited consumers to create their own 30-second video ads, with winners receiving cash awards and having their ads run during the Super Bowl. Based on the success of the “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, Doritos now runs new campaigns that create fun fan-made ads and other content throughout the year.16
Brands across a wide range of industries—from automakers and fast-food chains to home furnishings brands and pet food marketers—now routinely incorporate user-generated social media content into their own traditional and social media marketing campaigns. For example, trendy home furnishings maker West Elm runs a campaign called #MyWestElm. The campaign collects user-generated photos of West Elm products shared online and uses them in promotional posts on its web, Facebook, and Pinterest sites along with links to similar products on the company’s online store. So far, some 18,000 photos have been uploaded, and the MyWestElm website attracts 2 million monthly users. Moreover, 40 percent of West Elm’s product webpages now also contain user-generated photos showing buyers how fellow customers use the products in the real world.17
Consumer-generated content can make customers an everyday part of the brand. For example, rather than relying on high-powered advertising, shoe brand Converse steps aside and lets customers themselves co-create the brand and co-author the brand story (see Real Marketing 15.2). And action-camera maker GoPro has long featured consumer-made videos on its web and social media sites as a means of letting customers share their high-octane experiences with others. Such videos have attracted a huge following, creating an engaged GoPro customer community that helps shape and share GoPro usage and lore. The collection of high-quality user-made GoPro content contains truly spellbinding scenes captured by adventure-seeking amateurs and professionals.
Some of content is so good that the company has set up a GoPro Licensing division that licenses the best user-generated GoPro content to other brands for use in their own promotional campaigns, inviting them to “use the best of GoPro to tell your story.”18
Consumer-generated content: Some of GoPro’s user-made content is so good that the company’s GoPro Licensing division now licenses it to other brands for use in their own promotional campaigns, inviting them to “use the best of GoPro to tell your story.”
GoPro
Not all consumer-generated content efforts, however, are so successful. As many big companies have learned, ads and other content made by amateurs can be . . . well, pretty amateurish. If done well, however, consumer-generated content efforts can produce new creative ideas and fresh perspectives on the brand from consumers who actually experience it. Such campaigns can boost consumer engagement and get customers talking and thinking about a brand and its value to them.
Selecting Advertising Media
The major steps in advertising media selection are (1) determining reach, frequency, impact, and engagement; (2) choosing among major media types; (3) selecting specific media vehicles; and (4) choosing media timing.
Determining Reach, Frequency, Impact, and Engagement
To select media, the advertiser must determine the reach and frequency needed to achieve the advertising objectives. Reach is a measure of the percentage of people in the target market who are exposed to an ad campaign during a given period of time. For example, the advertiser might try to reach 70 percent of the target market during the first three months of a campaign. Frequency is a measure of how many times the average person in the target market is exposed to a message. For example, the advertiser might want an average exposure frequency of three.
But advertisers want to do more than just reach a given number of consumers a specific number of times. The advertiser also must determine the desired media impact—the qualitative value of message exposure through a given medium. For example, the same message in one magazine (say, Time) may be more believable than in another (say, the National Enquirer). For products that need to be demonstrated, television ads or online videos may have more impact than radio messages because they use sight, motion, and sound. Products for which consumers provide input on design or features might be better promoted at an interactive website or social media page than in a direct mailing.
Engaging the right consumers with the right media worked well for Mazda. Using a highly targeted digital campaign, it sold out 100 25th-anniversary models of its iconic Mazda MX-5 Miata car in only 10 minutes.
Special thanks to those at Mazda North America Operations. Here’s to 26 years of the MX-5 Miata and beyond. Long live the roadster.
More generally, an advertiser wants to choose media that will engage consumers rather than simply reach them. Using any medium, the relevance of ad content for its audience is often much more important than how many people it reaches.
Although Nielsen is beginning to measure media engagement levels for some television, radio, and social media, such measures are still hard to find in most cases. Current media measures are things such as ratings, readership, listenership, and click-through rates. However, engagement happens inside the head of the consumer. It’s hard enough to measure how many people are exposed to a given television ad, video, or social media post, let alone measure the depth of engagement with that content. Still, marketers need to know how customers connect with an ad and brand idea as a part of the broader brand relationship.
Engaged consumers are more likely to act upon brand messages and even share them with others. Thus, rather than simply tracking consumer impressions for a media placement—how many people see, hear, or read an ad—Coca-Cola now also tracks the consumer expressions that result, such as a comment, a “Like,” uploading a photo or video, or sharing brand content on social networks. Today’s empowered consumers often generate more messages about a brand than a company can.
For example, Coca-Cola estimates that of the hundreds of millions of views of Coca-Cola–related content on YouTube each year, only about 18 percent are of content created by Coca-Cola. The other 82 percent are of content created by engaged consumers. So, many Coca-Cola marketing campaigns are aimed at sparking brand-related consumer expressions rather than just impressions. For instance, the brand’s recent “Share a Coke” summer campaign—in which it swapped out the company’s iconic logo on 20-ounce Coke bottles for one of more than 1,000 of the nation’s most popular names—encouraged Coca-Cola fans to share the bottles with friends and family. Consumers could also share their Coca-Cola photos, stories, and experiences online using the hashtag #ShareaCoke, with selected posts featured on the brand’s website and across company billboards. The “Share a Coke” campaign resulted in more than 500,000 photos and 6 million virtual Coke bottles shared online along with a boost of almost 25 million Coca-Cola Facebook followers.20
Choosing among Major Media Types
As summarized in
Table 15.2, the major media types are television; digital, mobile, and social media; newspapers; direct mail; magazines; radio; and outdoor. Each medium has its advantages and its limitations. Media planners want to choose a mix of media that will effectively and efficiently present the advertising message to target customers. Thus, they must consider each medium’s impact, message effectiveness, and cost.
Table 15.2
Profiles of Major Media Types
As discussed earlier in the chapter, traditional mass media still make up a majority of today’s media mixes. However, as mass-media costs rise and audiences shrink, companies have now added digital, mobile, and social media that cost less, target more effectively, and engage consumers more fully. Today’s marketers are assembling a full mix of paid, owned, earned, and shared media that create and deliver engaging brand content to target consumers.
In addition to the explosion of online, mobile, and social media, cable and satellite television systems are thriving. Such systems allow narrow programming formats, such as all sports, all news, nutrition, arts, home improvement and gardening, cooking, travel, history, finance, and others that target select groups. Comcast and other cable operators are even testing systems that will let them target specific types of ads to TVs in specific neighborhoods or individually to specific types of customers. For example, ads for a Spanish-language channel would run in only Hispanic neighborhoods, or only pet owners would see ads from pet food companies.
Finally, in their efforts to find less costly and more highly targeted ways to reach consumers, advertisers have discovered a dazzling collection of alternative media. These days, no matter where you go or what you do, you will probably run into some new form of advertising:
Tiny billboards attached to shopping carts urge you to buy Pampers while ads roll by on the store’s checkout conveyor touting your local Chevy dealer. Step outside and there goes a city trash truck sporting an ad for Glad trash bags or a school bus displaying a Little Caesar’s pizza ad. A nearby fire hydrant is emblazoned with advertising for KFC’s “fiery” chicken wings. You escape to the ballpark, only to find billboard-size video screens running Budweiser ads while a blimp with an electronic message board circles lazily overhead.
These days, you’re likely to find ads—well—anywhere. Taxi cabs sport electronic messaging signs tied to GPS location sensors that can pitch local stores and restaurants wherever they roam. Ad space is being sold on parking-lot tickets, airline boarding passes, subway turnstiles, highway toll booth gates, ATMs, municipal garbage cans, and even police cars, doctors’ examining tables, and church bulletins. One company even sells space on toilet paper furnished free to restaurants, stadiums, and malls—the paper carries advertiser logos, coupons, and codes you can scan with your smartphone to download digital coupons or link to advertisers’ social media pages. Now that’s a captive audience.
Marketers have discovered a dazzling array of alternative media, like this heated Caribou Coffee bus shelter.
Caribou Coffee
Such alternative media seem a bit far-fetched, and they sometimes irritate consumers who resent it all as “ad nauseam.” But for many marketers, these media can save money and provide a way to hit selected consumers where they live, shop, work, and play.
Another important trend affecting media selection is the rapid growth in the number of media multitaskers, people who absorb more than one medium at a time. For example, it’s not uncommon to find someone watching TV with a smartphone in hand, tweeting, Snapchatting with friends, and chasing down product information on Google. One recent survey found that 90 percent of consumers now multitask while watching TV and that millennials and Gen X consumers engage in an average of three additional media activities while watching television, including internet browsing, text messaging, and reading email. Although some of this multitasking is related to TV viewing—such as looking up related product and program information—most multitasking involves tasks unrelated to the shows or ads being watched. Marketers need to take such media interactions into account when selecting the types of media they will use.21
Selecting Specific Media Vehicles
Media planners must also choose the best media vehicles—specific media within each general media type. For example, television vehicles include Modern Family and ABC World News Tonight. Magazine vehicles include Time, Real Simple, and ESPN The Magazine. Online and mobile vehicles include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Media planners must compute the cost per 1,000 persons reached by a vehicle. For example, if a full-page, four-color advertisement in the U.S. national edition of Forbes costs $163,413 and Forbes’s readership is 900,000 people, the cost of reaching each group of 1,000 persons is about $181. The same advertisement in Bloomberg Businessweek’s Northeast U.S. regional edition may cost only $48,100 but reach only 155,000 people—at a cost per 1,000 of about $310.22 The media planner ranks each magazine by cost per 1,000 and favors those magazines with the lower cost per 1,000 for reaching target consumers. In the previous case, if a marketer is targeting Northeast business managers, Bloomberg Businessweek might be the more cost-effective buy, even at a higher cost per thousand.
Media planners must also consider the costs of producing ads for different media. Whereas newspaper ads may cost very little to produce, flashy television ads can be very costly. Many online and social media ads cost little to produce, but costs can climb when producing made-for-the-web video and ad series.
In selecting specific media vehicles, media planners must balance media costs against several media effectiveness factors. First, the planner should evaluate the media vehicle’s audience quality. For a Huggies disposable diapers ad, for example, Parents magazine would have a high exposure value; men’s lifestyle magazine Maxim would have a low exposure value. Second, the media planner should consider audience engagement. Readers of Vogue, for example, typically pay more attention to ads than do Time readers. Third, the planner should assess the vehicle’s editorial quality. Time and The Wall Street Journal are more believable and prestigious than Star or the National Enquirer.
Deciding on Media Timing
An advertiser must also decide how to schedule the advertising over time. Suppose sales of a product peak in December and drop in March (for winter outdoor gear, for instance). The firm can vary its advertising to follow the seasonal pattern, oppose the seasonal pattern, or be the same all year. Most firms do some seasonal advertising. For example, weight-loss product and service marketers tend to heavy up after the first of the year, targeting consumers who let their appetites get the better of them over the holiday season. Weight Watchers, for instance, spends more than a quarter of its annual advertising budget in January. By contrast, Peeps, the perennial Easter favorite marshmallow chicks and bunnies candies, launched an “Every Day Is a Holiday” campaign to broaden demand beyond Easter, which accounts for an estimated 70 percent of the brand’s business. The campaign now promotes Peeps at Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holiday seasons. Some marketers do only seasonal advertising:
For instance, P&G advertises its Vicks NyQuil only during the cold and flu season.23
Media timing: Peeps’ “Every Day Is a Holiday” campaign promotes the favorite marshmallow chicks and bunnies candies at holiday seasons other than just Easter, here Halloween.
Richard Levine / Alamy Stock Photo
Today’s online and social media let advertisers create ads that respond to events in real time. For example, Lexus recently introduced a new model through live streaming from the North American International Auto Show via Facebook’s News Feed. Some 100,000 people watched the introduction live in only the first 10 minutes; another 600,000 viewed it online within the next few days. Oreos reacted in a timely way to a power outage during Super Bowl XLVII with an outage-related “You can still dunk in the dark” tweet ad. The fast-reaction ad was re-tweeted and Favorited thousands of times in only 15 minutes. Similarly, Arby’s created big buzz during a recent Grammy Awards show with a real-time tweet responding to Pharrell Williams’s infamous Vivienne Westwood hat, which looks a bit like the hat in the familiar Arby’s logo. The tweet “Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back?” earned more than 80,000 re-tweets and 45,000 Favorites.24
Evaluating Advertising Effectiveness and the Return on Advertising Investment
Measuring advertising effectiveness and the return on advertising investment has become a hot issue for most companies. Top management at many companies is asking marketing managers, “How do we know that we’re spending the right amount on advertising?” and “What return are we getting on our advertising investment?”
Advertisers should regularly evaluate two types of advertising results: the communication effects and the sales and profit effects. Measuring the communication effects of an ad or ad campaign tells whether the ads and media are communicating the ad message well. Individual ads can be tested before or after they are run. Before an ad is placed, the advertiser can show it to consumers, ask how they like it, and measure message recall or attitude changes resulting from it. After an ad is run, the advertiser can measure how the ad affected consumer recall or product awareness, engagement, knowledge, and preference. Pre- and post-evaluations of communication effects can be made for entire advertising campaigns as well.
Advertisers have gotten pretty good at measuring the communication effects of their ads and ad campaigns. However, sales and profit effects of advertising and other content are often much harder to measure. For example, what sales and profits are produced by an ad campaign that increases brand awareness by 20 percent and brand preference by 10 percent? Sales and profits are affected by many factors other than advertising—such as product features, price, and availability.
One way to measure the sales and profit effects of advertising is to compare past sales and profits with past advertising expenditures. Another way is through experiments. For example, to test the effects of different advertising spending levels, Coca-Cola could vary the amount it spends on advertising in different market areas and measure the differences in the resulting sales and profit levels. More complex experiments could be designed to include other variables, such as differences in the ads or media used.
However, because so many factors affect advertising effectiveness, some controllable and others not, pretesting ads and measuring the results of advertising spending remains an inexact science. Managers often must rely on large doses of judgment along with quantitative analysis when assessing content and advertising performance. That’s especially true in this content-hungry digital age, where large quantities of ads and other content are produced and run on a virtual real-time basis. Thus, whereas companies tend to carefully pretest traditional big-budget media ads before running them, digital marketing content usually goes untested. For digital and social media campaigns, says one chief marketing officer, “it’s very tough to test [and measure] just because of the volume [and timing] of the content we are putting out.”25
Other Advertising Considerations
In developing advertising strategies and programs, the company must address two additional questions. First, how will the company organize its advertising and content function—who will perform which advertising tasks? Second, how will the company adapt its advertising strategies and programs to the complexities of international markets?
Organizing for Advertising
Different companies organize in different ways to handle advertising. In small companies, advertising might be handled by someone in the sales department. Large companies have advertising departments whose job it is to set the advertising budget, work with ad agencies, and handle other advertising not done by an agency. However, most large companies use outside advertising agencies because they offer several advantages.
How does an advertising agency work? Advertising agencies originated in the mid- to late 1800s from salespeople and brokers who worked for the media and received a commission for selling advertising space to companies. As time passed, the salespeople began to help customers prepare their ads. Eventually, they formed agencies and grew closer to the advertisers than to the media.
Today’s agencies employ specialists who can often perform advertising and brand content tasks better than the company’s own staff can. Agencies also bring an outside point of view to solving the company’s problems along with lots of experience from working with different clients and situations. So, today, even companies with strong advertising departments of their own use advertising agencies.
Some ad agencies are huge; the largest U.S. agency group, Y&R, has annual gross U.S. revenues of $3.7 billion. In recent years, many agencies have grown by gobbling up other agencies, thus creating huge agency holding companies. The largest of these megagroups, WPP, includes several large advertising, PR, digital, and promotion agencies with combined worldwide revenues of more than $19 billion.26
Most large advertising agencies have the staff and resources to handle all phases of an advertising campaign for their clients, from creating a marketing plan to developing ad and content campaigns and preparing, placing, and evaluating ads and content. Large brands commonly employ several agencies that handle everything from mass-media advertising campaigns to shopper marketing to social media content.
International Advertising Decisions
International advertisers face many complexities not encountered by domestic advertisers. The most basic issue concerns the degree to which global advertising should be adapted to the unique characteristics of various country markets.
International advertising: McDonald’s unifies its global advertising under the familiar “i’m lovin’ it” theme in all its 100-plus markets worldwide, here China.
TED ALJIBE/AFP/GettyImages
Some advertisers have attempted to support their global brands with highly standardized worldwide advertising, with campaigns that work as well in Bangkok as they do in Baltimore.
For example, McDonald’s unifies its creative elements and brand presentation under the familiar “i’m lovin’ it” theme in all its 100-plus markets worldwide. Oreo’s latest “Open Up with Oreo” runs in 50 global with a simple universal message—“Open your heart to people who are different and you will discover similarities.”27 And Snickers runs similar versions of its “You’re not you when you’re hungry” ads in 80 different countries, from the United States and the United Kingdom to Mexico, Australia, and even Russia. No matter what the country, as noted in the Chapter 14 opening story, the ads strike a common human emotion that everyone can relate to—people get out of sorts and do uncharacteristic things when they need nutrition. A Snickers bar can help them get back to being their real selves. Snickers lets local markets make adjustments for local languages and personalities. Otherwise, the ads are similar worldwide.
In recent years, the increased popularity of online marketing and social media sharing has boosted the need for advertising standardization for global brands. Most big marketing and advertising campaigns include a large online presence. Connected consumers can now zip easily across borders via the internet and social media, making it difficult for advertisers to roll out adapted campaigns in a controlled, orderly fashion. As a result, at the very least, most global consumer brands coordinate their digital sites internationally. For example, Coca-Cola web and social media sites around the world, from Australia and Argentina to France, Romania, and Russia, are surprisingly uniform. All feature splashes of familiar Coke red, iconic Coke bottle shapes, and Coca-Cola’s music and “Taste the Feeling” themes.
Standardization produces many benefits—lower advertising costs, greater global advertising coordination, and a more consistent worldwide image. But it also has drawbacks. Most important, it ignores the fact that country markets differ greatly in their cultures, demographics, and economic conditions. Thus, most international advertisers “think globally but act locally.” They develop global advertising strategies that make their worldwide efforts more efficient and consistent. Then they adapt their advertising programs to make them more responsive to consumer needs and expectations within local markets. For example, although Visa employs its “Everywhere you want to be” theme globally, ads in specific locales employ local language and inspiring local imagery that make the theme relevant to the local markets in which they appear.
Global advertisers face several special problems. For instance, advertising media costs and availability differ vastly from country to country. Countries also differ in the extent to which they regulate advertising practices. Many countries have extensive systems of laws restricting how much a company can spend on advertising, the media used, the nature of advertising claims, and other aspects of the advertising program. Such restrictions often require advertisers to adapt their campaigns from country to country.
Thus, although advertisers may develop global strategies to guide their overall advertising efforts, specific advertising programs must usually be adapted to meet local cultures and customs, media characteristics, and regulations.