A Successful Advertising Campaign


From an advertising standpoint it has gotten more complicated to keep brands fresh. If you had a product when television transitioned from black-and-white to color, that changed a lot of things, too. But with today’s technology, the information age, the dissolving of borders, and a global marketplace, it is more complicated to maintain a brand.

Twenty years ago you could reach 80 percent of a certain demographic with one television buy. Now you have to buy 20 different channels to do that. There are exponentially more pieces of information from which to net out simple, compelling, motivating, creative advertisements. It is infinitely more complex and fragmented.

At its simplest, a successful advertising campaign helps move a client’s business goals forward. We do not advertise for entertainment or for the sake of producing great creative. Our point of view states that if you invest in advertising it must move your business somewhere. The movement can be from simply making a larger segment of the right people more aware of your offering to actually getting people into stores or increasing sales. If it does not create some sort of desired action then it is a failure. There are a wide range of actions that advertising and communications can instigate. At its simplest, advertising must do something or don’t bother investing in it.

A company or a product must have an overarching value proposition or a fundamental premise to offer a market. The greatest opportunity lies, however, in using the various communication channels — advertising, Internet, direct marketing, event marketing—to send the components of that proposition out to the market in different forms factors. For example, with one large retail client, an overarching brand proposition is used in the widest medium, television, but many important sub-messages go into a promotion or price offers at a store event that aren’t communicated though advertising. Today it is about multiple messages through multiple channels, but they all have to subscribe to a fundamental value proposition from the client.

A campaign should accurately reflect in a creative way who the company is, the product or the service being communicated. It cannot be an over-promise; it cannot be conjecture or fabricated. It has to be—creatively—a real picture of who the advertiser is. For us there are three principles that go behind the question, “When is advertising both effective and truthful?” One, the act of advertising must add value to those who are receiving it, e.g., a television commercial runs and someone either learns something or was genuinely entertained. The rule is: Don’t communicate and don’t advertise if the act of it doesn’t add some value. We also have an obligation to create a clear opportunity for those who are receiving it. Finally, there’s the concept of mutual respect: All of our creative portrayal must seriously respect those to whom we are speaking. In terms of creative, it must reflect the company’s aspiration, but then don’t waste people’s time and money unless you are going to put something fairly meaningful, albeit creative, in front of them.




The Art of Advertising. CEOs from BBDO, Mullin Advertising & More on Generating Creative Campaigns & Building Successful Brands
The Art of Advertising: CEOs from Mullen Advertising, Marc USA, Euro RSCG & More on Generating Creative Campaigns & Building Successful Brands (Inside the Minds Series)
ISBN: 1587622319
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 68

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