MEANING OF ADVERTISING

Advertising is nothing but a paid form of non-personal presentation or promotion of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor with a view to disseminate information concerning an idea, product or service. The message which is presented or disseminated is called advertisement. In the present day marketing activities hardly is there any business in the modern world which does not advertise. However, the form of advertisement differs from business to business.

Advertisement has been defined differently by different persons. A few definitions are being reproduced below:

According to Wood, "Advertising is causing to know to remember, to do."

According to Wheeler, "Advertising is any form of paid non-personal presentation of ideas, goods or services for the purpose of inducting people to buy."

According to Richard Buskirk, "Advertising is a paid form of non-personal presentation of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor."

According to William J. Stanton, "Advertising consists of all the activities involves in presenting to a group, a non-personal, oral or visual, openly sponsored message regarding disseminated through one or more media and is paid for by an identified sponsor." The above definitions clearly reveal the nature of advertisement. This is a powerful element of the promotion mix. Essentially advertising means spreading of information about the characteristics of the product to the prospective customers with a view to sell the product or increase the sale volume.
THE POWER OF ADVERTISING

We believe in the power of advertising, based on thousands of studies in our archives. Advertising has the power to persuade, the power to influence the mind and shape destiny. It has the power to change markets and improve profit margins. Advertising has short-term power (conveying new information, building awareness, enhancing credibility, etc.) and long-term power (conveying brand image, attaching emotional values to the brand, building positive reputation, etc.). The great power
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of advertising is seldom achieved in practice, but we cant give up. The potential and the promise are too great. The companies that master the creative guidance and the testing systems to consistently develop and deploy great advertising will own the future and the fortunes that go with it. Great advertising is a cloak of invincibility.

THE MAIN FEATURES OF ADVERTISE ARE AS UNDER:

It is directed towards increasing the sales of business. Advertising is a paid form of publicity. It is non-personal. They are directed at a mass audience and nor at the individual as is in the case of personal selling. Advertisements are identifiable with their sponsor of originator which is not always the case with publicity or propaganda.
OBJECTIVE / FUNCTIONS OF ADVERTISING

The purpose of advertising is nothing but to sell something -a product, a service or an idea. The real objective of advertising is effective communication between producers and consumers. The following are the main objectives of advertising: Preparing Ground for New Product
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New product needs introduction because potential customers have never used such product earlier and the advertisements prepare a ground for that new product. Creation of Demand The main objective of the advertisement is to create a favorable climate for maintaining of improving sales. Customers are to be reminded about the product and the brand. It may induce new customers to buy the product by informing them its qualities since it is possible that some of the customers may change their brands. Facing the Competition Another important objective of the advertisement is to face to competition. Under competitive conditions, advertisement helps to build up brand image and brand loyalty and when customers have developed brand loyalty, becomes difficult for the middlemen to change it. Creating or Enhancing Goodwill: Large scale advertising is often undertaken with the objective of creating or enhancing the goodwill of the advertising company. This, in turn, increases the market receptiveness of the company's product and helps the salesmen to win customers easily. Informing the Changes to the Customers Whenever changes are made in the prices, channels of distribution or in the product by way of any improvement
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in quality, size, weight, brand, packing, etc., they must be informed to the public by the producer through advertisement. Neutralizing Competitor's Advertising Advertising is unavoidable to complete with or neutralize competitor's advertising. When competitors are adopting intensive advertising as their promotional strategy, it is reasonable to follow similar practices to neutralize their effects. In such cases, it is essential for the manufacturer to create a different image of his product. Barring New Entrants From the advertiser's point of view, a strongly built image through long advertising helps to keep new entrants away. The advertisement builds up a certain monopoly are for the product in which new entrants find it difficult to enter. In short, advertising aims at benefiting the producer, educating the consumer and supplementing the salesmen. Above all it is a link between the producer and the consumer.
BENEFITS OR IMPORTANCE OF ADVERTISEMENT

Advertising broadens the knowledge of the consumers. With the aid of advertising, consumers find and buy necessary products without much waste of time. This speeds up the sales of commodities, increases the efficiency of labor in distribution, and diminishes the costs of selling.
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It is an accepted fact that without market stimulus of heavy advertising, consumers might have waited another sixty years for the product evaluation that took place in less than ten years - it took after all over sixty years from the invention of the safety razor before the first acceptable stainless steel blades appeared in the market. These words are more than enough to testify the potentialities of advertising in the field of modern marketing system. The main benefits of advertising may be narrated as follows:
BENEFITS TO MANUFACTURERS

It increases sales volume by creating attraction towards the product. It helps easy introduction of new products into the markets by the same manufacturer. It helps to create an image and reputation not only of the products but also of the producer or advertiser. In this way, it creates goodwill for the manufacturer. Retail price, maintenance is also possible by advertising where price appeal is the promotional strategy. It helps to establish a direct contact between manufacturers and consumers. It leads to smoothen the demand of the product. It saves the product from seasonal fluctuations by discovering new and new usage of the product. It creates a highly responsive market and thereby quickens the turnover that results in lower inventory.

Selling cost per unit is reduced because of increased sale volume. Consequently, product overheads are also reduced due to mass production and sale. Advertising gives the employees a feeling of pride in their jobs and to be in the service of such a concern of repute. It thus inspires the executives and worker to improve their efficiency. Advertising is necessary to meet the competition in the market and to survive.
BENEFITS TO WHOLESALERS AND RETAILERS

Easy sale of the products is possible since consumers are aware of the product and its quality. It increases the rate of the turn-over of the stock because demand is already created by advertisement. It supplements the selling activities. The reputation created is shared by the wholesalers and retailers alike because they need not spend anything for the advertising of already a well advertised product. It ensures more economical selling because selling overheads are reduced. It enables them to have product information.
BENEFITS TO CONSUMERS

Advertising stresses quality and very often prices. This forms an indirect guarantee to the consumers of the quality and price. Further large scale production assumed

by advertising enables the seller to seller product at a lower cost. Advertising helps in eliminating the middlemen by establishing direct contacts between producers and consumers. It results in cheaper goods. It helps them to know where and when the products are available. This reduces their shopping time. It provides an opportunity to the customers to compare the merits and demerits of various substitute products. This is perhaps the only medium through which consumers could know the varied and new uses of the product. Modern advertisements are highly informative.
BENEFITS TO SALESMEN

Salesmanship is incomplete without advertising. Advertising serves as the forerunner of a salesman in the distribution of goods. Sales are benefited the advertisement in following ways: Introducing the product becomes quite easy and convenient because manufacturer has already advertised the goods informing the consumers about the product and its quality. Advertising prepares necessary ground for a salesman to begin his work effectively. Hence sales efforts are reduced. The contact established with the customer by a salesman is made permanent through effective advertising because
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a customer is assumed of the quality and price of the product. The salesman can weigh the effectiveness of advertising when he makes direct contact with the consumers.
BENEFITS TO COMMUNITY OR SOCIETY

Advertising, in general, is educative in nature. In the words of the late President Roosevelt of the U.S.A., "Advertising brings to the greatest number of people actual knowledge concerning useful things: it is essentially a form of education and the progress of civilization depends on education." Advertising leads to a large-scale production creating more employment opportunities to the public in various jobs directly or indirectly. It initiates a process of creating more wants and their satisfaction higher standard of living. For example, advertising has made more popular and universal the uses of such inventions as the automobiles, radios, and various household appliances. Newspapers would not have become so popular and so cheap if there had been no advertisements. The cheap production of newspapers is possible only through the publication of advertisements in them. It sustains the press. It assures employment opportunities for the professional men and artist. Advertising does provide a glimpse of a country's way of life. It is, in fact, a running commentary on the way of
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living and the behavior of the people and is also an indicator of some of the future in this regard.
BARRIERS TO GREAT ADVERTISING

Advertising testing could provide a reliable feedback loop and lead to much better advertising, but many obstacles stand in the way. The first great barrier to better advertising is self-delusion. Most of us believe, in our heart-of-hearts, that we know what good advertising is and that there is no need for any kind of independent, objective evaluation. Agencies and clients alike often think that they know how to create and judge good advertising. Besides, once agencies and clients start to fall in love with the new creative, they quickly lose interest in any objective evaluation. No need for advertising testing. Case closed. Strangely, after 40 years of testing advertising, we cannot tell you if a commercial is any good or not, just by viewing it. Sure, we have opinions, but they are almost always wrong. In our experience, advertising agencies and their clients are just as inept at judging advertising as we are. It seems that none of us is smart enough to see advertising through the eyes of the target audience, based purely on our own judgment. A second barrier to better advertising is the belief that sales performance will tell if the advertising is working. Unless the sales response to the advertising is immediate and overwhelming, it is almost impossible to use sales data to judge the effectiveness of the advertising. So many variables are beyond our control, as noted, that its
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impossible to isolate the effects of media advertising alone. Moreover, some advertising works in a few weeks, while other advertising might take many months to show positive effects, and this delayed response can confound our efforts to read the sales data. Also, advertising often has short-term effects that sales data might reflect, and long-term (years later) effects that most of us might easily overlook in subsequent sales data. Because of these limitations, sales data tends to be confusing and unreliable as an indicator of advertising effectiveness. Sophisticated marketing mix modeling is one way to measure these advertising effects on sales, but it often takes millions of dollars and years of effort, and requires the building of pristine databases of sales information along with all of the marketing input variables. Few companies have the budget, the patience, the accurate databases, and the technical knowledge necessary to succeed at marketing mix modeling. Even so, marketing mix modeling does not help us evaluate the contribution of a single commercial but rather the cumulative effects of many different commercials over a long period of time. Also, marketing mix modeling does not tell us why the advertising worked, or failed to work. Was it message, or media weight, or media mix that made the advertising effective? Generally, marketing mix modeling cannot answer these types of questions. So, again, sales data is of limited value when you make critical decisions about your advertising. A third barrier to better advertising is a pervasive tendency of many (but not all) advertising agencies to delay,
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undermine, and thwart efforts to objectively test their creative babies. Who wants a report card on the quality of their work? Its very threatening. The results can upset the creative folks. The results can upset clients. The agency can lose control. Agencies can be quite creative in coming up with reasons to avoid copy testing. Some of our favorites: Theres no time. We have to be on air in five days, so well just have to skip the testing. These ads are built on emotion and feelings, and you cant measure such delicate, artful subtleties. Weve already tested the ads with a focus group during the development process. These are image ads, and you cant test imagery with standard advertising testing techniques. We have so much equity in this campaign that it doesnt matter what the testing results are. We cant afford to change. Were in favor of testing, but lets remove those questions about purchase intent and persuasion from the questionnaire. We are in a new age, with new media and new messages, and none of the old copy testing measures apply any more.
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The fourth barrier to more effective advertising is the big creative ego. The belief that only the "creatives" in the agency can create advertisingand the conviction that creativity is their exclusive domainconstitute a major barrier. Great advertising tends to evolve over time, with lots of hard work, fine-tuning, and tinkeringbased on objective feedback from target consumers. Big creative egos tend to resist such evolutionary improvements. We have seen great campaigns abandoned because agencies would not accept minor tweaks to the advertising. To be fair, big egos are not limited to advertising agencies. Big client egos can also be a barrier to good advertising. Research firm egos are yet another problem. Big egos create barriers because emotion is driving advertising decision making instead of logic, reason, and consumer feedback. Big egos lead to bad advertising. A fifth barrier to better advertising is the widespread belief that ones major competitors know what they are doing. So, just copy the advertising approaches of the competition, and success will surely follow. We recently had a client who was about to copy the advertising strategy of a major competitor, but we were able to persuade the client to test all major competitive commercials as a precaution before blindly copying the competitors advertising approach. This competitor was the industry leader in market share and profitability. Our testing quickly revealed that this industry leader was the industry leader in spite of its bad advertising. The testing also revealed that another competitor, in contrast, had great advertising. Needless to

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say, the clients desire to copy the industry leader quickly vanished. The sixth barrier to better advertising is lack of strategy, or having a poor strategy. The client is most often at fault here. The client has not done his homework, has not thought deeply about his brand and its future, and has not developed and tested strategy alternatives. The client tells the agency to go forth and create great advertising, without providing any strategy guidelines. The agency is left to guess and speculate about strategy. Great advertising is rarely created in a strategy vacuum. If the client cannot define a sound strategy, the agency cannot create great advertising. Again, the responsibility for strategy falls squarely on the client. A seventh barrier to better advertising is client ineptness. Some clients processes, policies, and people tend to discourage the creation of great advertising. Arrogance, ambiguity, impatience, ignorance, risk aversion, and inconsistency tend to be the hallmarks of these agency killer clients. Bad clients rarely stimulate or tolerate great advertising. The eighth and last barrier to better advertising is poor copy testing by research companies. Many advertising testing systems are limited to a few markets (and cannot provide representative samples). Some systems are so expensive that the cost of testing exceeds the value of the results. Research companies have been guilty of relying on one or two simplistic measures of advertising effectiveness, while completely ignoring many other very important variables.
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For instance, for several years research companies argued publicly over which was more important, persuasion measures or recall measures? The truth is that both are important, but of greater import is the fact that neither of these measures alone, or in combination, measures advertising effectiveness. To judge the effectiveness of an ad, many different variables must be measured and considered simultaneously.

CREATING BETTER ADVERTISING

Given all of these barriers to better advertising, how can client, agency, and research company work together to create more effective advertising? 1. The client must craft a sound strategy for its brand, based on facts, not wishful thinking and self-delusion. The client must carefully define the role of advertising in the marketing plan and set precise communication objectives for the advertising. What exactly does the client want the advertising to convey, to accomplish? Agencies are too often asked to create advertising in an informational vacuum. Agencies are not miracle workers. Once strategy and positioning alternatives are identified and tested, the strategy should be locked downand rarely changed thereafter. 2. As creative executions are developed against the strategy, each execution should be pretested among
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members of the target audience (pretesting refers to testing advertising before it is aired, and/or before final production. When the term testing is used in this article, it is a shorthand term for pretesting.) The greater the number of executions pretested, the more likely it is that great advertising will emerge. Testing the creative provides a reliable feedback loop that helps agency and client alike become smarter over time. Once a conceptual family of commercials is identified as the optimal campaign of the future, then the campaign should be locked down. Long-term continuity of advertising message is essential to maximizing effectiveness. 3. Use the same pretesting system consistently. There is no perfect advertising pretesting system. Some are better than others, but any system will help improve your advertising. The secret is to use one system over and over, so that everyone (client, agency, and researchers) learns how to interpret the pretesting results for the category and the specific brand. 4. If budget permits, test the advertising at an early stage in the creative process (i.e., the storyboard or animatic stage) and also test at the finished commercial stage. Early-stage testing allows rough commercials to be tweaked and fine-tuned before you spend the big dollars on final production. Early-stage testing tends to be highly predictive of finished commercial scores, but not always. Testing the finished commercials gives you extra assurance that
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your advertising is on strategy and working. 5. Build your own action standards over time. As you test every execution, you will begin to learn what works and what doesnt work. Think of the pretesting companys norms as very crude, rough indicators to help you get started with a testing program. But, as quickly as possible, develop your own norms for your category and your brand (yes, all of the advertising effectiveness measures vary by product category and brand). What you are searching for, long-term, are not norms, but action standards (that is, the knowledge that certain advertising testing scores will translate into actual sales increases). 6. Use a mathematical model to derive an overall score for each execution. It doesnt matter that an ad has great persuasion if it does not register the brand name. It doesnt matter that an ad registers the brand name if no one will notice the commercial itself. It doesnt matter that an ad increases short-term purchase interest if it will damage the brands quality reputation over time. So, all of the key variables must be put together intelligently to come up with a composite or overall measure of advertising effectiveness. 7. Use the pretesting results as a guide, as an indicator, but do not become a slave to the mathematical model. Read all of the open-ended questions carefully. Make sure you really understand the underlying reasons. Base your decisions on this comprehensive assessment
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of the results, and leave yourself some wiggle room. No model or system can anticipate every marketing situation, or give a 100% perfect solution every time. Informed human judgment remains important. 8. Client and agency need to accept that continuous improvement of the advertising is an important goal. This means that every execution is tested and tweaked based on scientific evidence from the target audience. We are not talking about changing the strategy or changing the campaign, but making sure that every execution is on strategy and working as hard as possible.
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The ultimate goal of testing is an advertising success formula that works. That is, the goal of advertising creative development, and the goal of advertising testing, is to identify the elements/ideas essential to advertising effectiveness, and then to make sure that those elements/ideas are consistently communicated by all advertising executions.

VARIOUS MEDIA FOR ADVERTISING

Advertising media are the means to transmit the message of the advertiser to the desired class of people. Similarly, there exist various media which can be effectively used for advertising. Mentioned below are the various categories or types of advertising. Have a look.
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Print Advertising -Newspapers, Magazines, Brochures, Fliers Print media has always been a popular advertising option. Advertising products via newspapers or magazines is a common practice. In addition to this, the print media also offers options like promotional brochures and fliers for advertising purposes. Often, newspapers and magazines sell the advertising space according to the area occupied by the advertisement, the position of the advertisement in the publication (front page/middle page, above/below the fold), as well as the readership of the publications. For instance, an advertisement in a relatively new and less popular newspaper will cost far less than an advertisement in an established newspaper that has a high readership. The price of print ads may also depend on quality of the paper and the supplement in which they appear. For example, an advertisement in the glossy (and popular) supplement of a newspaper costs more than one in a supplement which uses mediocre quality paper. Outdoor Advertising - Billboards, Kiosks, Trade-shows It makes use of several tools and techniques to attract the customers outdoors. The most common examples of outdoor advertising are billboards, kiosks, and also events and trade-shows organized by the company. Billboard advertising is very popular. However it has to be really terse and catchy in order to grab the attention of the passersby. Kiosks not only provide an easy outlet for the
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company's products but also make for an effective advertising tool to promote the company's products. Organizing special events or sponsoring those makes for an excellent advertising opportunity and strategy. The company can organize trade fairs, or even exhibitions for advertising their products. If not this, the company can organize several events that are closely associated with their field. For instance a company that manufactures sports utilities can sponsor a sports tournament to advertise its products. Broadcast Advertising - Television, Radio and the Internet Broadcast advertising is a very popular advertising medium that constitutes several branches like television, radio or the Internet. Television advertisements have been very popular ever since they were introduced. The cost of television advertising often depends on the duration of the advertisement, the time of broadcast (prime time/lull time), sometimes the show on which it will be broadcast, and of course, the popularity of the television channel itself. The radio might have lost its charm owing to new age media. However it remains the choice of small-scale advertisers. Radio jingles have been very a popular advertising medium and have a large impact on the audience, which is evident in the fact that many people still remember and enjoy old popular radio jingles. Covert Advertising Advertising in Movies

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Covert advertising is a unique kind of advertising in which a product or a particular brand is incorporated in some entertainment and media channels like movies, television shows or even sports. There is no commercial advertising as such in the entertainment but the brand or the product is subtly (or sometimes evidently) showcased in the entertainment show. Some of the famous examples for this sort of advertising have to be the appearance of brand Nokia which is displayed on Tom Cruise's phone in the movie Minority Report, or the use of Cadillac cars in the movie Matrix Reloaded. Pay attention next time, you're sure to come across a lot of such examples. Surrogate Advertising Advertising Indirectly

Surrogate advertising is prominently seen in cases where advertising a particular product is banned by law. Advertisements for products like cigarettes or alcohol which are injurious to health are prohibited by law in several countries. Hence these companies come up with several other products that have the same brand name and indirectly remind people of the cigarettes or alcohol of the same brand by advertising the other products. Common examples include Fosters and Kingfisher beer brands, which are often seen to promote their brand with the help of surrogate advertising. Public Service Advertising Advertising for Social Causes Public service advertising is a technique that makes use of
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advertising as an effective communication medium to convey socially relevant messages about important matters and social causes like AIDS, energy conservation, political integrity, deforestation, illiteracy, poverty and so on. David Ogilvy who is considered to be one of the pioneers of advertising and marketing concepts had reportedly encouraged the use of the advertising field for a social cause. Ogilvy once said, "Advertising justifies its existence when used in the public interest - it is much too powerful a tool to use solely for commercial purposes.". Today, public service advertising has been increasingly used in a noncommercial fashion in several countries across the world in order to promote various social causes. In the United States, radio and television stations are granted to bidders on the basis of a fixed amount of public service advertisements aired by the channel. 1. In-store advertising In-store advertising is any advertisement placed in a retail store. It includes placement of a product in visible locations in a store, such as at eye level, at the ends of aisles and near checkout counters (POPPoint Of Purchase display), eye-catching displays promoting a specific product, and advertisements in such places as shopping carts and in-store video displays. 2. Coffee cup advertising

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Coffee cup advertising is any advertisement placed upon a coffee cup that is distributed out of an office, caf, or drive-through coffee shop. This form of advertising was first popularized in Australia, and has begun growing in popularity in the United States, India, and parts of the Middle East. 3. Sheltered Outdoor Advertising This type of advertising opens the possibility of combining outdoor with indoor advertisement by placing large mobile, structures in public places on temporary bases. The large outer advertising space exerts a strong pull on the observer; the product is promoted indoor, where the creative decor can intensify the impression. CelebrityAdvertising Although the audience is getting smarter and smarter and the modern-day consumer is getting immune to the exaggerated claims made in a majority of advertisements, there exists a section of advertisers that still bank upon celebrities and their popularity for advertising their products. Using celebrities for advertising involves signing up celebrities for campaigns, which consist of all sorts of advertising including, television ads or even print advertisements. How effective these ads are, is something that each consumer himself can determine.

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