As a consumer, do you know how many promotional messages you’re bombarded with each day? The answer, depending on the time of year and where you happen to be, is that you are exposed to somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 adverts of one sort or another each day. Mind boggling, isn’t it?
If you don’t believe me, just think about it for a moment. You wake up and put the radio on; you hear advertising. You eat your breakfast and read the paper and you see adverts. You drive to work or go on the train and are confronted with more advertising. You get to work and read publications such as MI and, yes, you are faced with more adverts. You open your post and flyers and brochures hit your desk. You read your e-mail and, yes, receive messages about a new product. You go home and face yet more adverts during your journey; switch on the TV and you’re hit with promotional messages, you go to bed and read a magazine – including
more advertising.
Get the message? Actually, you probably don’t in the vast majority of cases because the advertising simply passes you by. We all like to think we have the ability to shut out advertising and remain uninfluenced by it, but I’m afraid it’s not quite as simple as that. If it was, product manufacturers would not spend billions each year on campaigns. They spend the money because the advertising works.
Getting the message
So why have I just said you don’t get the message in the majority of cases. For a variety of reasons. In some cases, the advertising will not be targeting you. Have you ever looked at an advert and thought, ‘I don’t get it, what’s that all about?’ The most likely reason is probably because you are not in the target group. But it’s not just an age thing. The adverts may be targeting the opposite sex, or people in special interest groups or activities which just don’t concern you.
Another reason you may not get the message is because the advertising is simply not that good. One of the classic advertising crimes is including too much information, so that the core message becomes lost. I hate to say it but lots of financial advertisers have been guilty of committing this crime. You know what I mean – mortgage adverts crammed with so much detail that it’s difficult to understand what the advert is actually about.
Computer manufacturers also make the same error. Adverts can be so full of ‘tech-specs’ that it’s almost impossible to understand who a particular laptop is aimed at. There are also those adverts which assume you have a greater knowledge of the subject than you actually have.
A great deal of advertising is therefore not going to ‘stick’. However, that leaves an awful lot that does. This advertising will influence you, if only subliminally at first. In many instances it will not generate an immediate and obvious reaction, such as getting you to pick up the phone and ask for further information. However, the message will be stored in the back of your brain and will be recalled next time you are thinking about that product or service. The cumulative effect over a period of time is to make you predisposed to buy that product or service.
It’s why companies sponsor everything from football teams to events and concerts. It’s not simply about being associated with a Premiership football club; it’s also about being exposed to you as a brand as frequently as possible. Traditional press adverts work on the same basis, in that adverts need to be ‘campaigned’ over a period of time. Placing an advert once and hoping it will do its job is, I’m afraid, wishful thinking.
Science of advertising
The science of advertising is that an effective campaign should be greater than the sum of its parts. It may involve press advertising, direct mail, exhibitions, online promotions, and sponsorship. What makes it successful is not the effect of an individual advert or sponsorship deal, but the cumulative effect of all the activity. An advert may sow the seeds in a consumer’s mind; sponsorship may act as a reminder, a website may provide further information and a promotion may generate the decision to buy.
No matter how well constructed an advertising campaign may be, it still needs to have impact. It should make the reader stop and take note and, for that reason, good adverts are often willing to break the mould and be different to other adverts targeting the same consumer group. One technique is to use images which will strike a chord with the reader.
This theory is all well and good for advertisers with big budgets, but what about brokers with far more modest campaign funds? Exactly the same principles apply. It doesn’t matter if you’re advertising cars on TV and sponsoring football teams or, on the other hand, if you’re placing a few adverts in a local paper and sponsoring the local cricket club. Your objectives remain the same – to build a desire among your target audience to use your services.
Think holistically. Look at the big picture and think in terms of campaigns rather than just individual adverts.
It’s very noisy in advertising land. Make sure your adverts speak louder than your competitors’.
