Advertising management
Advertising management is a planned management process designed to monitor and control the various advertising campaigns involved in the process of communicating with a company's target market and, ultimately, influencing consumers' purchasing decisions.
Advertising is only one element of a company's promotional mix and must therefore be integrated with an overall marketing communications plan. However, advertising is the most expensive of all promotional elements and must be managed carefully.
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| What is Advertising management in 2022 |
Marketers use different types of advertising. Brand advertising is an impersonal communication of information placed in paid mass media to persuade targeted consumers to buy a product or service. Corporate advertising is a paid message designed to convey the value of a business to influence public opinion. However, other types of advertising, such as non-profit advertising and political advertising, require different strategies and approaches due to their specificity.
Advertising management is a complex process involving multiple levels of decision-making, including developing an advertising strategy, setting an advertising budget, setting advertising goals, identifying target markets, media strategy (which involves media planning ), developing an information strategy, and evaluating the role of advertising overall effectiveness. The management of advertising may also involve media buying.
Ad management is a complex process. At the simplest level, however, ad management can be reduced to four key decision areas:
- Target Audience Definition: Who do we want to talk to?
- Information (or creative) strategy: what do we want to say to them?
- Media Strategy: How will we reach them?
- Measuring Ad Effectiveness: How do we know if our ads are being accepted by consumers in the expected form and effect?
Advertising and corporate responsibility
In a business organization, advertising and other marketing communications activities are the ultimate responsibility of the marketing department. Some companies outsource some or all of the work to specialized departments such as advertising agencies, creative design teams, web designers, media buyers, event management specialists, or other related service providers.
Alternatively, the company performs most or all of the advertising functions within the marketing department, a so-called in-house agency. By definition, in-house agencies are "advertising organizations owned and operated by the companies they serve". Its mission is to provide advertising services in support of its parent company's business and marketing goals. Well-known brands currently using in-house proxies are Google, Calvin Klein, Dell, IBM, Kraft, Marriott, and Wendy's (Wendy's) et al.
Both in-house agency and outsourcing models have their pros and cons. Outsourcing to an outside agency allows marketers to acquire highly specialized strategy, research, and planning skills, access top creative talent, and provide an independent perspective on a marketing or advertising issue. An in-house agency offers cost advantages, and time efficiencies, and gives marketers more control over advertising efforts.
In addition, people working in in-house agencies gain considerable creative experience that continues to be used within the company. Recent trends suggest that the number of in-house ad agencies is on the rise.
Whether a company chooses to outsource the advertising function to an external agency or perform it within the marketing department, marketers need to have a solid understanding of advertising principles to develop an effective advertising plan, brief relevant agencies on their needs and expectations, or target Marketing problems develop their own creative solutions.
Advertising planning
Advertising planning does not come out of thin air. Advertising objectives are derived from marketing objectives. Therefore, the first step in any advertising plan is to review the objectives presented in the marketing plan. This is to ensure that all advocacy efforts, including advertising, are committed to short- and long-term company and marketing goals and are aligned with the company's values and vision.
Review marketing plan
A review of a marketing plan can be a relatively simple process or a formal review called an audit. A review or audit may consider the following issues: previous marketing communications campaigns, evaluation of past effective campaigns, the need for a new round of market research, a summary of competing advertising campaigns, and budget considerations.
Marketing plans can provide information on a company's long-term and short-term goals, competitors, target market descriptions, products offered, positioning strategies, pricing strategies, distribution strategies, and other promotional plans. All of this information has potential implications for the development of advertising programs.
Advertisers must carefully study the marketing plan and decide how to translate the marketing objectives into the advertising plan. Every ad campaign is unique, so review requires a lot of analysis and judgment.
Overall communication goals
Communication goals are derived from marketing goals. The dissemination goal must be based on the dissemination effect. For example, a company's short-term marketing goal might be to increase sales response for a brand, and this goal would require a large number of consumers to know about the brand and have a favorable inclination toward it.
In addition, consumers’ purchase intent may depend on other marketing activities such as a variety of channels used, price, ability to try brands before final purchase, and other marketing activities. Marketing communications is only one element of the overall marketing effort, so it would be unfair to hold it accountable for all sales.
While advertising is an excellent tool for increasing brand awareness and points of interest, it does not necessarily translate this consumer desire into actual purchase behavior. To convert interests into sales, different promotional tools such as personal sales or promotions may be more useful. Many cautions against using sales or market share targets for marketing communications or advertising purposes.
Communication goals may include:
- increase purchases
- encouraged to try
- Build loyalty
- Position or reposition your brand
- Educating customers
These all need to be translated into advertising goals.
a.) Target market and target audience
The review should pay attention to the entire target market. However, this does not necessarily mean that the advertising campaign will target the entire target market. Marketers and advertisers differentiate between the target audience of an advertising message and the target market for a product or brand.
By definition, a target audience is an intended audience for a given advertisement or message in a publication or broadcast medium, while a target market includes all existing and potential consumers of a product, service, or brand. Companies often develop different advertising messages and media strategies to target different target audiences. For example, McDonald's restaurants used anthropomorphic brand features, Ronald McDonald and burger imagery, in their advertising to children, which were important influencers in children's choice of brand.
However, for an adult target audience, McDonald's uses messages that emphasize convenience and quality. Thus, the target audience for a given advertising message may include only a subset of the total market defined in the marketing plan. A careful reading of the marketing plan will help marketers identify the best target audience for a specific advertising objective.
b.)Push-pull strategy
Communication goals, more or less, depend on whether marketers use a "push" or "pull" strategy.
In a promotional strategy, marketers advertise intensively with retailers and wholesalers with the expectation that they will stock a product or brand that consumers will buy when they see it in a store.
In a pull strategy, by contrast, marketers advertise directly to consumers in the hope that they will put pressure on retailers to stock up on a product or brand, thereby pulling the product or brand through the distribution channel.
In a promotional strategy, the promotional mix would include trade advertising and sales calls, while advertising media would typically be weighted by trade magazines, exhibitions, and trade shows, while a pull strategy would make more extensive use of consumer-oriented advertising and Promotions, while the media mix will focus on mass-market media such as newspapers, magazines, television, and radio.
Setting advertising goals
Setting advertising goals provides the framework for the entire advertising program. Therefore, it is important to clearly state what is being achieved and outline how the ad will be evaluated. Advertising goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, and time-dependent (SMART). Any statement of advertising goals must include benchmarks—the standard by which the effectiveness of advertising is measured.
The DAGMAR method (Defining Advertising Objectives to Measure Advertising Effectiveness) developed in the 1960s was one of the first methods to establish communication-oriented objectives. Although it is iconic, the DAGMAR approach fails to provide specific guidance on how to link advertising objectives to communication effectiveness.
To set realistic advertising goals, most advertisers try to relate advertising or communication goals to communication effectiveness. Rossiter and Bellman argue that, for advertising purposes, five communication effects should be considered, namely:
- Category Needs: Consumers accept that a category (product or service) is necessary to satisfy a need
- Brand awareness (brand recognition and brand recall): the ability of consumers to identify a brand or recall a brand name from memory
- Brand preference (or brand attitude): the degree to which consumers choose a brand
- Brand behavioral intent (purchase intent): Consumers’ self-indications to purchase a brand
- Purchase facilitation: the extent to which consumers know how and where to buy a brand
| The psychological state of target consumers' communication | Communication/Advertising Objectives | Examples of advertising messages category |
|---|---|---|
category needs
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| Avoiding Pain: "For Fast, Certain Pain Relief, Anacin" |
Brand awareness
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| Pairing Classification - Brand Association: "When You Think Chocolate, You Think Cadbury" |
brand preference
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| Brand preference: "Burger King (or Hungry Jack's) has better burgers." |
Purchase Intention
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| Intention to buy: "Hurry up, hurry up the last day, the offer must expire soon"; "Don't wait - limited stock" |
purchase intent
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| Promoting Purchases: "Refer to the nearest retailer's website" |
For many purchasing behaviors, category needs and purchasing convenience that customers are bound to take into account can be omitted from advertising objectives. However, for some purchase behaviors, the customer may not know the product category or how to buy it, in which case these goals need to be addressed in the communication goals. Brand awareness, brand preference, and purchase intent are often the goals of advertising.
