Understanding Advertising Baltimore MD

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Advertising is a $300 billion industry in the United States alone. Plunkett Research, Ltd. (the company that provided this figure) points out that the large numbers don’t stop there. In the United States, advertisers flood the following mediums in droves:

1,749 broadcast TV stations (and that’s not including cable and satellite TV outlets)

13,599 radio stations

2,250 daily and Sunday newspapers

And those figures don’t even take into consideration the thousands of magazines, direct mail, Web sites, blogs, outdoor advertising (billboards, bus shelters, and so on), or specialty or alternative advertising, which includes everything from airplane banners at the beach to tchotchkes, small items like tote bags, pens, and t-shirts that merchants and businesses give away to remind consumers to do business with them.

With all these choices of how to get your message out there, how do you decide what’s the best medium to reach the customers you’re looking for? And how can you develop an ad campaign that won’t get lost in the morass? You don’t have to hire an ad agency. But you can also do it yourself.

In this article, I fill you in on the basics of advertising — what’s effective and what isn’t. Then I give you a short course on all your advertising options — radio, TV (network and cable), magazines and newspapers, direct mail, outdoor, the Web, and more — and I show how you can put them to work for you. Finally, I end with stories about two legends of advertising as well as brief introductions of more recent ad giants, because if you focus on the best and figure out what they’ve done well, you can try to incorporate some of their genius into your own advertising — and come out ahead of the competition.

Making Advertising Work

Effective advertising sells a product or a service that fulfills all the promises made about it. On the other hand, effective advertising also sells inferior products or services, but only once!

So what makes advertising effective? Effective advertising is:

Creative: It delivers the advertising message in a fresh, new way.

Hard-hitting: Its headline, copy, or graphic element stops readers or listeners dead in their tracks.

Memorable: It ensures that the audience will remember your business when they think about the products and services you’re selling.

Clear: It presents its message in a concise, uncomplicated, easy-to-grasp manner.

Informative: It enlightens the audience about your business and products, while giving them important reasons to buy from you.

Distinctive: It is unique and immediately recognizable as yours.

The well-established brands that most people use every day — brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, McDonald’s and Burger King, Budweiser and Miller, Bayer and Advil, Ford and Chevy, Tide and Cheer — live up to the promises made in their advertising. In fact, the products live up to the promise in such a dramatic fashion that those products have become a part of the everyday lives of millions of people. These products have been branded, which simply means that when you think of soft drinks, fast food, beer, pain relievers, cars, or laundry detergents, these brands come to mind. As surely as the cowboys of the Old West branded the haunches of their cattle, these products have been branded into your psyche— and the psyches of millions of other consumers.

When you begin to create advertising for your product or service, keep these suggestions in mind:

Don’t make promises you can’t live up to. Although your ad may draw more people to your product initially, you can’t retain these people as loyal customers in the long run if you make promises you can’t keep.

Identify the best features of whatever it is you’re selling and develop your advertising around these features. Think about how your product stands out from the competition, what sets it apart, and then focus on those attributes.

Try to create a memorable advertising message for your product. You want people to think of your store, your product, or your professional service whenever they’re in the market for such a thing.

If your message is creative, clear, and concise, if your product or service is something that can truly benefit people and live up to its hype, then you’re on the road to producing effective advertising.

If your advertising makes bold promises about your product, you may convince a lot of people to try it. But if those people buy your product and give it a try, and the product turns out to be less than you advertised it to be, you will most certainly never see those consumers again. Think about it: How many times have you responded to an advertising message for a new, improved, astounding product, only to be disappointed with the item after you tried it? You probably even felt like you’d been ripped off. If your advertising message leaves consumers with the same feeling, you simply won’t get anywhere.

Getting to Know Your Media Options

Advertising comes in all shapes and sizes. And a big part of developing your ad plans and campaign is to decide which mediums are best suited to advertising your particular business. Following is a brief overview of your options, with details from Plunkett Research, Ltd. to give you a ballpark idea on how many billions of dollars are spent annually in each medium in the United States.

Radio advertising is a $20 billion business — and it has expanded both because listeners can now tune in on the Internet and because of the development of satellite radio (Sirius and XM subscriber-based programming). But it’s also competing with MP3 devices, which means there may be fewer listeners to any given radio station or program.

But if your business appeals to consumers who’re likely to subscribe to this type of programming, or if you can reach them on broadcast radio during drive time or particular radio programs (especially those with celebrity hosts), then you should consider this medium.

TV is a $68 billion business — and that includes the almost 2,000 broadcast stations plus the many cable and satellite TV stations. The growth in the number of stations has actually made it easier for advertisers, because TV programming is so much more targeted. For example, the audience for The History Channel is probably very different from, say, Lifetime or Oxygen or WE, the Women’s Entertainment channel.

Still, TV advertising is the most expensive medium, so you should consider TV commercials only if you can afford them. TV is still a mass medium, even with the more-focused channels mentioned, and your ad budget may be better spent on a more narrowly focused media.

Print advertising encompasses both newspapers (daily and Sunday papers), which is a $49 billion business, and magazines, which is a $21 billion business. Newspapers are obviously a good choice if your business is regional and you’re targeting a broad consumer base; magazines are more-specifically tailored to different readers — for example, a subscriber to Glamour probably isn’t also subscribing to, say, Maxim, though the media kits of each provide the details on the number and demographics of the subscriber base.

Keep in mind, though, that many people who used to get information from newspapers and magazines now have the additional option of online subscriptions — to either those same publications or to alternatives that have never been printed on paper but are available only on the Internet.

Imitation: The sincerest form of flattery
Every now and then I see or hear an image advertisement that is so creative, so wonderfully conceived, and so (relatively) inexpensively produced that I wish I had written it myself. It has been said that no original ideas are out there, but occasionally a fresh, new approach to delivering the same old message comes along. And I file it away in my memory as something that, someday, I may want to imitate. If the ad is especially impressive, I even find out which agency is responsible for it and write it a congratulatory note.

One such ad was a radio spot for Berkeley Farms, a major Northern California dairy. Instead of creating a straight, consumerdirected ad extolling the virtues of its milk, the company created a recruitment ad for “new employees.” Instead of just telling its audience what superior milk they can take home when they buy the Berkeley Farms brand, a warm, motherly, female voice opens the spot with the wonderful line, “If you’re a cow, I want to tell you about Berkeley Farms — it’s a great place to work.” She goes on to tell any cows who may be listening that they can expect to be fed only the finest hays and grains, which a full-time vet is always on call in case they get sick, that their stalls are always kept clean and tidy, and that they are foolish cows indeed if they chose to work anywhere else.

This spot is a memorable one because it uses a creative twist — talking to the cows, not the consumers — to a great advantage. Hey, if this dairy is good enough for the cows, then it must be good enough for you! And this spot can undoubtedly inspire me to think of a fresh pointof- view for some retail commercial I write in the future.

When you sit down to write advertising for your business, using ideas and techniques from other advertising to help you find your own “creative hook” is perfectly okay. No, I am not giving you permission to lift someone else’s copy verbatim or to steal a concept out of hand. But good advertising done by others can be a great source of creative inspiration. Even the big boys do it. One advertising agency comes out with a fresh, new look in its ads, something that hasn’t been seen before, and everyone else jumps all over it. It happens all the time. Just be sure you know the difference between imitating and plagiarizing, and stick to the former.

Direct mail is a $45 billion business, and it’s alive and well even with the growth of e-mail and other Internet advertising. Charitable organizations still send pitches for funds to continue their good works (like The Red Cross, The American Cancer Society, and Doctors Without Borders). Similarly, cultural institutions use direct mail to solicit donor support, which they need to supplement ticket prices from their audiences (think of your local theater company, public radio station, and even PBS). And direct mail includes the myriad catalogs that fill all of our mailboxes — from Land’s End to L.L. Bean to Victoria’s Secret, to J.Crew (to name just a few).

Outdoor advertising includes everything from billboards on highways to ads on bus kiosks, in subway cars, on taxis, or even on benches and other signage. As a $6 billion industry, it’s a small part of overall annual ad expenditures.

Last, but by no means least, is the newest ad medium — online — even though the Internet hardly seems “new”; still, it’s only been since the mid-’90s that companies have used the Web to advertise products, services, and businesses.

Technically, publicity isn’t really part of advertising, but good publicity can serve to advertise your business. Publicity is really about getting someone else to advertise your business. Basically, you’re calling attention to what you’re doing in a way that your newspaper may want to report on it, or a magazine may want to write a feature article about your business, or a TV show host or radio host may be so intrigued by something you’ve done that they talk about you on their shows.

Where your advertising appears is every bit as important as what message it contains — maybe even more so. Advertising is a numbers game: You want to spend as little money as possible, as effectively as possible, to reach as many people as possible, in order to make your phone and your cash register ring.

Consider your many media options very carefully. You can waste your advertising dollars very easily by using the wrong media for your advertising goals. Mass media advertising is affordable. But so-called “affordable” advertising in the wrong media is a gigantic waste of your dollars and your time. No matter how affordable the media is, if it doesn’t bring customers through your door, you aren’t really saving money. On the contrary, you’re draining your limited budget without being the least-bit effective.

A spectacularly ineffective advertising vehicle
One of the other tenants in our office building — a small insurance company specializing in assigned-risk auto coverage (for customers whose driving records aren’t exactly stellar) — recently unveiled its latest, breakthrough advertising vehicle. And I do mean vehicle.

I came to work one morning and couldn’t miss it, parked out on the curb in all its glory. The company had pounded out the dents on a 1960s Volkswagen bus, spent $50 to have it freshly painted a sparkling bathtub white, and bolted a 4-by-8-foot, double-faced billboard to the roof to advertise its business. Because the old wreck needed brakes, our business neighbors quit driving it around town and parked the thing conspicuously in the parking lot in front of our building, much to the chagrin of the other tenants. The sign that sat atop this moveable beast, purportedly to tell the world about the company’s insurance business, included no less than 32 words (including sure thing and no driver refused) and an 11-digit phone number, all arranged helter-skelter in 6 different fonts and painted in 3 different colors.

The bus was a gigantic waste of advertising dollars. But the business owner probably thought, like so many small to mid-sized retailers and service businesses do, that he couldn’t afford “real” advertising. So he tried the VW bus routine instead. I don’t think I have to tell you to avoid this kind of mistake at all costs.

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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.

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