Advertising Media Planning

A Brand Management Approach

Larry D. Kelly, Donald W. Jugenheimer, Kim Bartel Sheehan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317477617
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Updated and greatly expanded to reflect the explosive growth of new media, this acclaimed and widely-adopted text offers practical guidance for those involved in media planning on a daily basis as well as those who must ultimately approve strategic media decisions. Its current, real-world business examples and down-to-earth approach will resonate with students as well as media professionals on both the client and agency side.

Chapter 1

The Role of Communication in Advertising and Marketing: Why Media Are Important

Advertising involves communicating information. The communication is often persuasive. The media are the conduits through which the advertising is communicated to the members of the audience.

Communication is critical to advertising success. You may recall the four Ps, the four components of the marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. Advertising is communicated promotion.

Advertising is also part of marketing communications. Some marketers break up the marketing mix into the four Cs: commodity, cost, channel, and communication. These four elements are analogous to the four Ps, but this view makes it even more obvious that communication is a critical process in the success of advertising, which in turn is critical to marketing success.

Now let’s say that you are a brand manager. You are responsible for the marketing success of a product or service, or a brand, or maybe an entire line of goods. Your personal and professional success depends on your brand’s success. Perhaps you are an advertising account executive or account supervisor, or even a top-level executive who wants the entire company or corporation to do well. The success of your advertising is crucial to your product’s welfare and success.

Whatever your job title, you are concerned with the sale of the product or service that you are marketing. Sure, you are interested in the advertising campaign strategy, and you review and approve all the advertising copy and themes before they go to production. Nevertheless, the media portion of the campaign may not really interest you. After all, it is detailed, it is somewhat abstract, and it is invariably complicated. You may believe that the heart of advertising is the message, so you probably concentrate on the theme, headlines, visuals, and copy. You may give cursory review to the research and to the media plan, but they are not your primary focus. Or maybe you do not delve deeply into the media plan because you do not fully understand the concepts and workings of advertising media.

So why should you be so interested in advertising media and the media plans that underscore your campaign? There are several reasons why advertising media, the conduits that carry advertising communication, are important to you and critical to the success of your advertising.

Media: Most of the Budget

First, advertising media take up most of the advertising budget. Media time and space are expensive: in a typical advertising campaign, the media costs account for 80 to 85 percent of the advertising budget; the remaining 15 or 20 percent covers research, message, production, evaluation, and profits for the advertising agency (see Exhibit 1.1).

If advertising media control the bulk of your advertising budget, you should spend sufficient time and effort making sure that the media plans are sensible and that the media selection and purchases are relevant and efficient. In most situations, 20 percent of the effort produces 80 percent of the revenue. You may be spending only 20 percent of your effort on the 80 percent of the advertising campaign that will make or break your campaign success. Anything that accounts for 80 percent of the monies and a large share of the campaign success deserves a large share of your attention and effort.

Advertising media may seem complicated and somewhat arcane to you. The purpose of this book is to give you the background and information you need to be an informed and capable manager, one who understands and administers the entire advertising effort, including the media planning, selection, and buying.

So advertising media account for most of your advertising budget and are therefore worthy of your attention and interest. But there are more reasons why advertising media are important to you.

A Poor Media Plan Sabotages an Entire Campaign

Let’s say you have a great advertising campaign plan. The theme is memorable, the visuals are impressive, and the words are emphatic. What good is it if those message elements do not reach the intended audience?

Suppose you’re selling canned soup. The media team targets traditional users of canned soup—mothers of young children—but the copy team prepares advertisements intended to encourage single people to use the soup for a quick, wholesome meal. The message will not make much sense to the media audience because the media and copy strategies do not match.

Exhibit 1.1

Typical Allocations for a Consumer Advertising Campaign

A typical advertising campaign budget is divided up for a variety of needs and purposes. Here is a sample advertising budget from a campaign to promote a consumer packaged good.

Budget item	Budget allocation (%)
Research, precampaign, and postcampaign evaluation	3–6
Message development	5–8
Advertising media	80–85
Production	4–7
Overhead, administration, agency profits	1–3

Source: Advertising Research Foundation.

A great advertising message in front of the wrong audience is a total waste of time and effort. If you focus on the message strategies and ignore the media strategies, you risk sabotaging the entire package: the campaign, the budget, and everyone’s hard work.

That, of course, is where the advertising media plan plays its role. A solid media plan with good media selection and media buying can ensure that the message reaches the right people at the right time and in the right mood. Based on solid research, a good media effort is what makes the rest of the advertising campaign work—or not work.

Media Are Least Understood

Most advertising campaigns are sold to the client advertiser based on the message. If the message is good, the campaign is more likely to be adopted. That’s because the message is inherently the most interesting part of the advertising campaign. And it should be. The message is what is going to attract, inform, entertain, promote, convince, and sell your service or product. It is supposed to be attractive and interesting.

The advertising agency stresses the message, the advertiser client sees and hears the message, and the prospective campaign is adopted based largely on the message. Typically, the advertiser (the client) pays attention to messages and promotions, and maybe even to research, but not to the media plan. To match the client’s interests in a proposed advertising campaign, the advertising agency presents more material dealing with the message and not as much dealing with research, production, evaluation, or media.

So most proposed campaign presentations spend the most time on the message strategies and relatively little on the media portion of the campaign. The top executives may assume that the media plan is complete and logical, but that is not always the case.

This is precisely why you need to pay attention to the media plan. Whereas others might be apt to downplay or overlook it, you are the one responsible for making sure that the media plan makes sense and can be accomplished efficiently and accurately for the complete success of the advertising campaign.

Media Are Critical to Success of the Brand

Obviously, then, advertising media are critical to advertising success. Advertising success brings with it the achievement of the marketing goals: more sales, positive opinions, increased awareness, word-of-mouth recommendations, competitive advantages, or whatever your goals may happen to be. Accomplishing those goals makes your brand successful, and hanging on that brand success is your success as a brand manager, or as an account executive or supervisor or administrator.

Advertising media are critical to the success of the brand and thus critical to your success as a manager. As we have already seen, poor media choices can waste an entire advertising campaign. On the other hand, proper and efficient use of advertising media can ensure its success, and it is up to you to be certain that the media contribute all they potentially can to that end.

Client Exposure to the Advertising

Advertisers like to see their own advertising. Top executives know how much is being spent on advertising, and they want to see and hear that advertising in the media. Top executives who know and approve total advertising budgets are not likely to understand the nuances of advertising, including media. They simply know they are spending large sums of money to promote their products and services, and they want to see effective outcomes. These outcomes will eventually be product sales and brand preference, but in the meantime executives want to see their advertising running in the media.

You may not target media specifically to reach those executives. You may not even know which media the executives read, listen to, or watch. But if your media plan reaches your industry and your prospects, you will be reaching your own executives and supervisors as well.

Good media plans make sure that the advertisements appear in places where they will be exposed to your firm’s executives. The only way to be certain that will happen is if you are on top of advertising media in general, and your specific advertising media plan in particular.

Media Support Product Positioning

Perhaps the most crucial decisions you make involve positioning for the product or service that you are marketing. Brand positioning plays a critical role in the success or failure of your marketing program. Once the position has been determined, it must be translated into advertising; the positioning is meaningless if it is not supported in the advertising.

One of the most sensible and direct ways of translating positioning into advertising is through advertising media. The media reach those same customers whom you have selected as the target audience for the brand and its position. There is no way that positioning will be successful if it is not supported adequately and accurately through the media selections and placements.

So successful marketing depends on successful positioning. If you want your positioning to be successful, you must select and utilize advertising media effectively, efficiently, and, above all, accurately. Advertising media play an essential role in your brand’s success and, ultimately, in your own success and progress.

The Ever-Changing World of Media

The basics of good marketing communications have remained constant over the years, and positioning strategy has changed only slightly since the late 1980s. Still, advertising media have evolved rapidly over the past 10 years, led principally by the digital media revolution.

We have certainly seen the rise of new kinds of advertising media over the past decade. The Internet has led the way with a wide variety of media such as search-engine marketing, rich media, and streaming audio and video. Other media channels have come into play, including the iPod, cellular phones, video games, and satellite radio. Existing media have evolved as well. The area of point-of-sale advertising has been transformed in the 21st century, with opportunities appearing in seemingly every venue. Malls now have digital signs that show television commercials. In some major markets, buses contain television sets that are programmed to show a retail ad within a block or two of the advertising establishment. Ads are popping up in elevators, inside fortune cookies, and even on celebrity and wannabe-celebrity body parts.

The rise of consumer-generated media is redefining the media landscape as well. Now, anyone with a video camera can shoot a commercial and post it on the Internet. Blogs, which are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Role of Communication in Advertising and Marketing: Why Media Are Important
• 2. Outlining the Components of a Communication Plan
• 3. How Marketing Objectives Impact Communication Planning
• 4. Working with a Situation Analysis
• 5. Defining the Target Audience
• 6. Geography’s Role in Planning
• 7. Seasonality and Timing
• 8. Competitive Analysis: Implications in Planning
• 9. Creative Strategy: Implications in Planning
• 10. Working with a Communication Budget
• 11. Setting Communications Objectives
• 12. Establishing Media Objectives and Tactics
• 13. Learning the Language of Media Planning
• 14. Learning about Media Costs
• 15. General Characteristics of Media
• 16. Broadcast Media
• 17. Print Media
• 18. Out-of-Home Media
• 19. Digital Media
• 20. Social Media
• 21. In-Store Media
• 22. Direct Response
• 23. Alternative Media
• 24. Ethnic Media
• 25. Sponsorships
• 26. Sales Promotion
• 27. Publicity
• 28. Preparing an Advertising Media Plan
• 29. Evaluating an Advertising Media Plan
• 30. Impact of Media Ownership on Advertising Execution
• 31. Developing Test Plans
• 32. Agency Compensation Structures
• Appendix. How the Advertising Business Is Organized
• Index
• About the Authors