What is advertising?
Marketing organizations use advertising as one of the four main forms of promotional (or integrated marketing communications) activity to communicate with consumers in a way that is both insightful and convincing. Advertising is distinct from other major forms of promotional activity (such as personal selling, sales promotion, and public relations) in that it is a paid, non-personal form of communication usually delivered through mass media (such as television, the internet, radio, newspapers, magazines, and billboards).
It is "paid" in the sense that when a marketer, for example, buys a full-page ad in BusinessWeek or airs a 30-second television commercial during a 60 Minutes broadcast, the sponsor/marketer pays the media organization for the space or time used to advertise itself or its goods. Advertising is "non-personal" in the sense that it is not tailored to the needs, desires, and expectations of individual message recipients, as personal sale is. Instead, advertising is usually standardized, so that the vast majority of people who see and/or hear a given advertisement get the same message.
Celebrity endorsers, music, and highly imaginative, attention-grabbing imagery and catchphrases are usually the first things that come to mind when most people think of ads. Successful advertising, on the other hand, entails much more. Marketers who want to communicate effectively and efficiently through advertising must first identify their target audience and then carefully select which media types and vehicles to use, usually with the help of advertising agencies. They, along with their advertising agencies, generate messages that not only catch the target audience's attention, but also inform and/or convince them in a desired direction. This is never a simple task.
The fact that cultural and legal environments differ significantly from country to country makes these difficult tasks even more difficult for international marketers. As a result, advertising that works brilliantly in one country may be perceived as irrelevant, absurd, and/or offensive by the target audience in another country. When the latter happens, foreign advertisers have not only made themselves look bad, but they have also spent a lot of money doing so.
What are the advantages of advertising?
Advertising has both strengths and weaknesses when compared to other forms of promotion, as the foreign marketer should be aware. Advertising's primary advantage over other forms of promotion, in my opinion, is its ability to reach a large, geographically dispersed target audience at a low cost. Let's say a major global consumer goods company, such as Colgate-Palmolive, is planning to launch a new toothpaste brand around the world. Advertising in a general interest news magazine like Time, which is sold and read in many regions and countries around the world, is a good way to sell the new product to the target audience at a low cost.
Advertising's ability to reach a narrowly targeted/niche target audience with minimum waste circulation is related to its ability to reach a large, geographically dispersed audience at a low cost. The term "waste circulation" refers to how advertising, especially through magazines and Web pages, can cost-effectively get a marketer's promotional message out to a niche audience with very few individuals or organizations outside the targeted group that sees it. Marketers care about reducing waste circulation because they are paying to connect with their customers.
Finally, compared to other forms of promotional activity, advertising is effective at both establishing a prestige image for the marketer and appealing to the target audience in a multisensory manner. In terms of prestige, advertising enhances the marketer's image especially when the marketer is relatively unknown. The use of well-known, respected celebrities in advertisements can also help to build or increase prestige. In terms of multisensory advertising, television and Web page advertising provide marketers with unrivaled opportunities to capture attention, inform, and/or persuade target audiences through the simultaneous and synergistic use of sight and sound. Even radio advertising, which is limited to sound, provides the creatively inclined international marketer with plenty of opportunities to appeal to the listener's senses. In this respect, radio has been referred to as "theatre of the mind."
What are the disadvantages of advertising?
While advertising has a number of distinct advantages over other forms of promotional activity, it also has a number of drawbacks. One of the most significant disadvantages of advertising is its high total cost. Simply put, advertising can be a great investment, but the absolute dollar volume required to produce and run ads on a global even national, regional, or local scale can be significant.
Another relative weakness of advertising is its inability to provide timely feedback on its effectiveness to the marketer, when comparing ads to personal selling (i.e., using salespeople to promote a company or its products), this flaw is especially pronounced.
When a salesperson makes a sales presentation to a client, for example, he or she can determine in real time whether their promotional message is: (1) being heard, and (2) having the desired informative and/or persuasive impact. Because the marketer is not present when the message is sent and because multiple exposures to an advertisement are required for it to have any impact, it may take weeks or even months to determine how successful promotional efforts have been.
Not only does judging the efficacy of ads take a long time, but it's also difficult to accurately measure the informative and/or persuasive impact of advertising. Finally, customizing promotional messages with advertisements is difficult, if not impossible. Personal selling, for example, allows a marketer to tailor each message sent to the precise needs, desires, and expectations of each individual being targeted.
Although major magazines allow for some customization through the publication of specialized regional or national editions, every one of the potentially hundreds of thousands of people who receive a single issue of the magazine sees the same advertisement. Individualized customization is virtually impossible in major broadcast media such as radio and television, and even if it were possible, it would be prohibitively costly.
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