Advertising

Advertising is the creation of a campaign that promotes a brand, product, scheme, charity, company or event over a period of time to attract a chosen target audience and convince or persuade them, using radio, magazines, posters, viral, newspapers, billboards, social media or on TV.

What are the earliest advertisements?

In June 1836, French newspaper La Presse was the first to include paid advertising in its pages, allowing it to lower its price, extend its readership and increase its profitability and the formula was soon copied by all titles.




How much do companies usually spend on advertising?

The amount of money a company spends in advertising is different by industry, company size and a company's life cycle. The many variables that affect advertising decisions make it difficult to discuss advertising in terms of the average company spending.

For example, The Gorilla campaign was launched by Cadbury in 2007 to promote the Cadbury Diary milk chocolate. The television advert lasted 90 seconds but cost £6.2 million to create.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo

What is the advertising campaign process?

1. Step 1 - Briefing: The advertiser needs to brief about the product or the service which has to be advertised and doing the SWOT analysis of the company and the product.
2. Step 2 - Knowing the Objective: One should first know the objective or the purpose of advertising. i.e. what message is to be delivered to the audience?
3. Step 3 - Research: This step involves finding out the market behavior, knowing the competitors, what type of advertising they are using, what is the response of the consumers, availability of the resources needed in the process, etc.
4. Step 4 - Target Audience: The next step is to identify the target consumers most likely to buy the product. The target should be appropriately identified without any confusion. For e.g. if the product is a health drink for growing kids, then the target customers will be the parents who are going to buy it and not the kids who are going to drink it.
5. Step 5 - Media Selection: Now that the target audience is identified, one should select an appropriate media for advertising so that the customers who are to be informed about the product and are willing to buy are successfully reached.
6. Step 6 - Setting the Budget: Then the advertising budget has to be planned so that there is no short of funds or excess of funds during the process of advertising and also there are no losses to the company.
7. Step 7 - Designing and Creating the Ad: First the design that is the outline of ad on papers is made by the copywriters of the agency, then the actual creation of ad is done with help of the art directors and the creative personnel of the agency.
8. Step 8 - Perfection: Then the created ad is re-examined and the ad is redefined to make it perfect to enter the market.
9. Step 9 - Place and Time of Ad: The next step is to decide where and when the ad will be shown.
   The place will be decided according to the target customers where the ad is most visible clearly to them. The finalisation of time on which the ad will be telecasted or shown on the selected media will be done by the traffic department of the agency.
10. Step 10 - Execution: Finally, the advert is released with perfect creation, perfect placement and perfect timing in the market.
11. Step 11 - Performance: The last step is to judge the performance of the ad in terms of the response from the customers, whether they are satisfied with the ad and the product, did the ad reached all the targeted people, was the advertise capable enough to compete with the other players, etc. Every point is studied properly and changes are made, if any.