- Advertsing planning
- Creative services
- Media services
- Research services
- Sales promotion and merchandising services
Advantage of using Advertising Services
- Employ the best creative minds in the advertsing industry.
- They have accumulated experience from working with a wide diversity of clients; have a broader perspective and are more objective.
- May save the organization's money.
- Agencies are more familiar with the media and media vehicles.
Q. When to test Ads?
A. Pretest: Measures taken before the campaign is implemented.
Post-test: Measures taken after the ad or commercial has been released.
Pretesting can be done at following stages:
1. Concept generation testing:
- Laboratory rest
- Field test on Focus groups (customers, for eg. in mall by giving questionnaires)
2. Rough, predefined art, copy or commercial testing
- Lab testing
- comprehension and reaction test
- consumer juries
3. Finished art or commercial pretesting
a. Print messages
- Portfolio tests
- Readability tests
- Dummy advertising
b. Broadcast
- theatre test
- on-air test
Physiological vehicle
Measures
- Pupil dilation
- Eye tracking
- Galvanic skin response
Methods of Post-testing Ads:
1. Post-test of Print Ad:
- enquiry test
- recognition test
- recall test
2. Post-test of Broadcasted ads
- day-after recall test
- persuasive measures
- diagnostics
- comprehensive measures
- test marketing
- single source tracking studies
How to Test?
In order to improve the research used in preparing testing and testing ads, providing a better creative product for clients, and controlling the cost of TV commercial; a set of nine principles called PACT ( positioning advertising copy testing) is used.
1. Providing measurements that are relevant to the objectives of the advertising.
2. Require agreement about how the results will be used in advance of each special test.
3. Provide multiple measurements.
4. Be based on the model of human response to communication.
5. Allow for consideration of whether the advertsisng stimulus should be exposed more than once.
6. Require that the more finished a piece of copy is the more soundly it can be evaluated and require as a minimum, that alternative executions to be tested in the same degree of finish.
7. Provide controls to avoid the biased effects of the exposure context.
8. take into account basic consideration of sample definition.
9. demonstrate reliability and validity.
Legal Aspect of Advertising:
A Misrepresentation or omission
There are a variety of ways in which misrepresentations or omissions can occur:
1. Suggesting that a small difference is important.
2. Artificial product demonstrations
3. Using an ambiguous or easily confused phrase.
4. Implying a benefit that does not fully or partially exist.
5. Implying that a product benefit is unique to a brand.
6. Implying that a benefit is needed or that a product will fulfill a benefit when it will not.
7. Incorrectly implying that an endorser uses and advocates the brand.
8. Making a claim without substantiation
9. Bait and switch
10. Identifying the advertising
11. Telemarketing
12. Intellectual property
Puffery
A rather well-established rule of law is that trade puffing is permissible. Puffing takes two general forms. The first is a subjective statements of opinion about a product’s quality, using such terms as “best or greatest”. Nearly all advertisements contain some measure of puffery. “You can’t get any closer” (Norelco), “Try something better” (J&B Scotch), “ Gas gives you a better deal” (American Gas Association), “ Live better electrically” (Edison Electric Institution), “State Farm is all you need to know about insurance,” and “Super Shell” are examples. None of these statements has been proved to be true, but neither have been proved false. They all involve some measure of exaggeration
The second form of puffery is exaggerations extended to the point of outright spoof that is obviously not true. A Green Giant is obviously fictitious, and even if he were real, he wouldn’t be talking the way he does. In the 1927 Ostermoor case, the court pointed to the puffery argument in denying that a mattress company was deceptive in using an illustration appearing to depict that the inner filling of a mattress would expand to 35 inches when in fact it would expand only 3 to 6 inches. Based on stated definitions and policy, puffing has been narrowed to the point where no deceptive claim can properly be termed puffery.
Bait and Switch
In retail sales, a bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in customers by advertising a product or service at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute is. The goal of the bait-and-switch is to convince some buyers to purchase the substitute good as a means of avoiding disappointment over not getting the bait, or as a way to recover sunk costs expended to try to obtain the bait. It suggests that the seller will not show the original product or product advertised but instead will demonstrate a more expensive product.
Other advertising practices, such as the use of sales techniques to steer customers away from low-profit items, depend on many of the same psychological mechanisms as a bait and switch. In the United States, courts have held that the purveyor using a bait and switch operation may be subject to a lawsuit by customers for false advertising, and can be sued for trademark infringement by competing manufacturers, retailers, and others who profit from the sale of the product used as bait. However, no cause of action will exist if the purveyor is capable of actually selling the goods advertised, but aggressively pushes a competing product.
Likewise, advertising a sale while intending to stock a limited amount of, and thereby sell out, the loss-leading item advertised is legal in the United States. The purveyor can escape liability if they make clear in their advertisements that quantities of items for which a sale is offered are limited.
Unscrupulous real estate agents commonly engage in bait and switch by continuing to advertise attractive properties in their windows that they have already sold.
In a recent Nebraska case, gas stations advertised fuel for a low price on their sign, but that price was only available at one pump. Customers would have to figure out which pump had the lower priced fuel, or would have to pay a higher price. The state Attorney General intervened, and the gas stations now advertise the pump number with the lower price.
Advertising and Consumer Behavior
Consumer Behavior is defined as the process and activities people engage in when searching for, selecting, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing products and services, so as to satisfy their needs and desires.
A challenge faced by all marketers is to how to influence the purchase behavior of consumers in favour of the products and services they offer.
In this situation the success of marketers depend upon
- Understanding consumer behavior properly which would include specifc needs of the consumer as well as their purchase criteria- (low priced/high priced product, customized product, useful product)
- How consumers gather information regarding other alternatives and select one among them.
Purchase decisions-
Factors
Persons involved in making purchase
Basic model of consumer decision making:
stages in the consumer decision making process:
1. Problem recognition
2. Information search
3. Alternative evaluation,
4. Purchase decision,
5. post-purchase evaluation decision
Related inter-personal psychological process:
1. Motivation
2. Perception
3. Attitude Formation
4. Integration
Advertising Creativity
It is the ability to generate fresh, unique and appropriate ideas that can be used as solution sto communication problems.
To be appropriate and effective:
Creative idea must be relevant to the target audience.
Creative departments of an agency as well as with the clients.
Planning Creative Strategy
The creative challenge
taking creative risk
creative personnel
The Creative Process;
- Developed by James Webb Young( former VP at JW Thompson)
The Process contains 5 steps:
- Immersion- gathering raw material and immersing yourself in the problem.
- Digestion- Taking the information, working over and wrestling with it in the mind.
- Incubation - Putting the problems out of our conscious mind and turning the information over to sub-conscious mind to do work.
- Illumination: The birth of an idea.
- Reality and Verification: Studying the idea to see if it still looks good or solves the problem. Ten shaping the idea to practise usefulness.
Development of Creative Strategy:
Advertising Campaign should be built and a Campaign Theme that should be strong, as it is the central message that will be communicated in all the advertising and promotional activities.
eg. DeBeers- Diamonds are Forever,
Nike - Just do It!
The development of the ad campaign is called as the creative brief, creative reprint as creative contract.
Copy Platform - Basic Outline
basic problem or issue of the advertising must address.
