A historical look at advertising
Advertising is not an innovation of the twentieth century. In the ancient ruins of Pompeii you can see messages advertising gladiatorial events. Town criers in ancient Greece acted in the same manner as car radios as they announced important news and public events.
Until the 1870s most advertising by manufacturers was directed to wholesalers and retailers. With the appearance of consumer magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s, slogans and jingles became the call of the day. Manufacturers hoped to gain control over the channel of distributing, which consisted of small, independent wholesalers and retailers. It was the pull strategy to popularize the brand to ultimate consumers with slogans (for example: the New York Times used this slogan “All the news that’s fit to print” in 1880s.).
At the turn of the century advertising was not viewed by respectable businesses as an essential part of marketing strategy. Henry Ford showed the value of advertising in drawing customers in 1927. He ran a series of advertisements announcing the appearance of the new Model A in 2000 newspapers at a cost of $1.3 million. Near hysteria resulted, as 1 million New Yorkers lined up outside the dealer showroom in Manhattan to view the car.
In the 1940s advertising became more acceptable. After the war, millions of new households were created and became the target for marketing efforts, which were enhanced by the technological breakthrough of a new medium: television.
Advertisement effectiveness
If you want to make adverstisement effective you should know some extremely important things:
• Who is the target audience?
• What are the advertising goals?
• What is the amount of money that can be budgeted for the advertising program?
• When should the advertisements be run?
First of all, you should identify the target audience, the group of prospective buyers toward which an advertising program is directed. To the extent that time and money permit, the target audience for the advertising program is the target market for the firm’s product, which is identified from marketing research and market segmentation studies.
In advertising the science-fiction movie Starman, Columbia Pictures identified two segment for the who decision. The film was promoted to women in daytime commercials emphasizing its romantic aspects. Different commercials stressed its space hardware on television shows watched by different segment: teenagers and space enthusiasts.
So, the more a firm knows about its atrget audience’s profile – including their lifestyle, atitudes, and values – the easier it is to make and advertising decision. If a firm wanted to reach you with its ad, it would need to know what TV shows you watch and what magazines you read.
After the target audience is identified, a decision must be reached on what the advertising campaign is to execute. Consumers can be said to respond in terms of hierarchy of effects:
• Awareness: the consumers ability to recognize and remember the product or brand name
• Interest: An increase in the consumer’s desire to learn about some of the features of the product or brand
• Evaluation: the first consumer’s impression about the product or brand
• Trial: the comsumer’s first purchase and us of the product
• Adoption: after the first trial the consumer’s repeated purchase
Although sometimes an advertising program stresses one main step. For example, awareness is often generated by humor, sound or fear, besides, the first trial of the product is often availalable for magazines readers becouse of many samples in them, and so on.
It is much easier to gain awareness for TV commercials. There was some kind of experiment made with 251 undergraduate students. They saw a 4-minute cut with either a sexually oriented or dramatic scene. After seeing one of the show scenes and one of the commercials, students were asked to indicate their interest in the commecial. The mean scores for the men are shown in the diagram. Results show that the commercial with the sexual plot was more effective than the other one. Actually, these results are for the 138 men in the study, but similar results were found for the women. The researchers concluded that sex does generate awareness in both male and female audiences.
In conclusion, the advertiser should always know the advertisement audience, what the audience like, than attract somehow the attention of that audience and sexual oriented scenes always attracts.
Selecting the right media
Every advertiser must decide where to place the advertisements. This decision is related to the target audience, type of product and available budget.
Newspapers and Magazines
Because of the daily publication of most papers, they allow advertisements directed to immediate consumer actions such as “sale today only”. Usually local retailers use newspapers as almost their sole medium.
In many countries there are so many newspapers and advertiser has trouble reaching even partial market coverage. Uruguay has 21 daily newspapers with more than half a million circulation, Turkey 380…. In contrast, Japan has five national daily newspapers, and the largest has a circulation of almost 7 million…