Companies typically plan and execute their advertising through five stages: developing the budget, planning the advertising, copy development and approval, execution, and monitoring response.

Media-Selection Strategy Media may be defined as those channels through which messages concerning a product or service are transmitted to targets. The following media are available to advertisers: newspapers, magazines, television, radio, outdoor advertising, transit advertising, direct mail, and the Internet. Selection of an advertising medium is influenced by such factors as the product or service itself, the target market, the extent and type of distribution, the type of message to be communicated, the budget, and competitors’ advertising strategies. Except for the advertising perspectives employed by the competition, information on most of these factors is presumably available inside the company. It may be necessary to undertake a marketing research project to find out what sorts of advertising strategies competitors have used in the past and what might be expected of them in the future. In addition, selection of a medium also depends on the advertising objectives for the product/market concerned. With this information in place, different methods may be used to select a medium. Mention must be made here of an emerging medium, i.e., Internet advertising. Online advertising is booming and had reached about $2 billion in 199

8. Internet advertising offers a variety of advantages. It offers an exceptional ability to target specific customers. Besides, it blurs the division between content and advertising, which the traditional media regard as sacred. If the money is right, many online publishers are willing to strike whatever sort of partnerships an advertiser might want. However, ad rates on the Net are steep enough to justify the cost. Most advertisers pay at least as much to reach an Internet audience, typically $10 to $40 per 1000 viewers, as they would for TV or magazine ads. Further, the emotion-laden vignettes that work so well on TV simply don’t woo viewers in cyberspace. Presently, most marketers see Internet advertising as little more than a complement to traditional media. Despite the above problems, Internet advertising will account for a growing proportion of overall advertising expenditure. As the technology improves, the impact of Internet advertising will increase and become easier to measure, and the gap between this new precise, interactive marketing capability and conventional “fuzzy” passive media will widen. The following reasons are advanced for the growing popularity of Internet advertising:10 (a) The Web presents great advertising opportunities for marketers because of its continuing growth, its user demographics, its effectiveness, and its costcompetitiveness. (b) The overall Web population is reaching critical mass. Recent surveys show there are 25 to 40 million adult Web users in the United States between one-eighth and one-fifth of the population. Twenty-five million Americans use the Web at least once a week, according to one source, and8.4 million are daily users.

The average user spends8.6 hours a month on line. (c) The demographics of Internet users are broadening, but remain attractive. More women are now using the Internet: one survey puts the figure at 47 percent, another at 38 percent. In financial terms, 91 percent of those who used the Web in the past six months have household incomes above $60,000 almost double the average U.S. household income of $31,000. Marketers pursuing certain segments of the population are finding the Internet increasingly useful. For those interested in, say, American men aged 35 to 44 with incomes over $75,000, the Web can provide access to about 2 million over 40 percent of the target demographic segment, and a critical mass in itself. (d) Studies have shown that the Internet is reasonably good at achieving standard advertising objectives, such as shaping attitudes. However, it also has capabilities that traditional media cannot match. Features that make the Internet a superior medium include its addressability, its interactivity, and its scope for customization. Advertisers can do things on the Internet that are impossible in traditional media: identify individual users, target and talk to them one at a time, and engage in a genuine two-way dialogue. (e) In terms of advertising economics, the Internet can already compete with existing media, both in response as measured by click-throughs and in exposure as measured by cost per thousand. Moreover, the Internet’s economics look better and better the more precisely a target consumer segment is defined. The cost to an Internet advertiser of reaching families that earn over $70,000 and own a foreign car, for instance, can be less than a quarter the cost of using a specialty magazine such as Car and Driver. (f) Like traditional media, the Internet needs consistent metrics and auditing in order to gain broad acceptance from marketers. Both are emerging slowly, driven by old players such as Nielsen and new ones such as Web Track. (g) Advertisers and agencies cannot afford to produce a different ad and negotiate a different price for every site. Standards for size, position, content, and pricing are badly needed and are now being developed; an example is CASIE, the Coalition for Advertising Supported Information and Entertainment, a joint project of the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies. (h) Unless they place their ads on one of the few highly trafficked sites, advertisers find it difficult to ensure that sufficient people see them. Responding to advertisers’ need for scale, placement networks such as DoubleClick do the aggregating for them, making sure that a specified number of people will be exposed to their ads.

Advertising Objectives. To build a good advertising program, it is necessary first to pinpoint the objectives of the ad campaign. It would be wrong to assume that all advertising leads directly to sales. A sale is a multiphase phenomenon, and advertising can be used to transfer the customer from one phase to the next: from unawareness of a product or service, to awareness, to comprehension, to conviction, to action. Thus, the advertiser must specify at what stage or stages he or she wants advertising to work. The objectives of advertising may be defined by any one of the following approaches: inventory approach, hierarchy approach, or attitudinal approach. Inventory Approach. Anumber of scholars have articulated inventories of functions performed by advertising. The objectives of an ad campaign may be defined from an inventory based on a firm’s overall marketing perspective. For example, the following inventory may be used to develop a firm’s advertising objectives:

A. Increase sales by

1. Encouraging potential purchasers to visit the company or its dealers.

2. Obtaining leads for salespeople or dealers.

3. Inducing professional people (e.g., doctors, architects) to recommend the product.

4. Securing new distributors.

5. Prompting immediate purchases through announcements of special sales and contests. B. Create an awareness about a company’s product or service by

1. Informing potential customers about product features. 2 Announcing new models.

3. Highlighting the unique features of the product.

4. Informing customers as to where the product may be bought.

5. Announcing price changes.

6. Demonstrating the product in use.

The inventory approach is helpful in highlighting the fact that different objectives can be emphasized in advertising and that these objectives cannot be selected without reference to the overall marketing plan. Thus, this approach helps the advertiser avoid operating in a vacuum. However, inherent in this approach is the danger that the decision maker may choose nonfeasible and conflicting objectives if everything listed in an inventory seems worth pursuing. Hierarchy Approach. Following this approach, the objectives of advertising should be stated in an action-oriented psychological form. Thus, the objectives of advertising may be defined as (a) gaining customers’ initial attention, perception, continued favorable attention, and interest; or (b) affecting customers’ comprehension, feeling, emotion, motivation, belief, intentions, decision, imagery, association, recall, and recognition.

The thesis behind this approach is that customers move from one psychological state to another before actually buying a product. Thus, the purpose of advertising should be to move customers from state to state and ultimately toward purchasing the product. Although it makes sense to define the purpose of an individual ad in hierarchical terms, it may be difficult to relate the purpose so defined to marketing goals. Besides, measurement of psychological states that form the basis of this approach is difficult and subjective compared to the measurement of goals such as market share. Attitudinal Approach. According to this approach, advertising is instrumental in producing changes in attitudes; therefore, advertising goals should be defined to influence attitudinal structures. Thus, advertising may be undertaken to accomplish any of the following goals:

1. Affect those forces that influence strongly the choice of criteria used for evaluating brands belonging to the product class.

2. Add characteristic(s) to those considered salient for the product class.

3. Increase/decrease the rating for a salient product class characteristic.

4. Change the perception of the company’s brand with regard to some particular salient product characteristic.

5. Change the perception of competitive brands with regard to some particular salient product characteristic. The attitudinal approach is an improvement over the hierarchical approach because it attempts to relate advertising objectives to product/market objectives. This approach indicates not only the functions advertising performs, it also targets the specific results it can achieve. Advertising objectives should be defined by a person completely familiar with all product/market perspectives. A good definition of objectives aids in the writing of appropriate ad copy and in selecting the right media. It should be recognized that different ad campaigns for the same product can have varied objectives. But all ad campaigns should be complementary to each other to maximize total advertising impact. Product/market advertising objectives may be used to derive media objectives. Media objectives should be defined so as to answer such questions as: Are we trying to reach everybody? Are we aiming to be selective? If housewives under 30 with children under 10 are really our target, what media objectives should we develop? Are we national or regional? Do we need to concentrate in selected counties? Do we need reach or frequency or both? Are there creative considerations to control our thinking? Do we need color or permanence (which might mean magazines and supplements), personalities and demonstration (which might mean television), the best reminder for the least money (which might mean radio or outdoor), superselectivity (which might mean direct mail), or going all the way up and down in the market (which could mean newspapers)? The following is a list of sample media objectives based on these questions:

1. We need a national audience of women.

2. We want them between 18 and 34.

3. Because the product is a considered purchase, we need room to explain it thoroughly.

4. We need color to show the product to best advantage.

5. We must keep after these women more than once, so we need frequency.

6. There’s no way to demonstrate the product except in a store. Media-Selection Procedure. Media selection calls for two decisions: (a) which particular medium to use and (b) which specific vehicles to choose within a given medium. For example, if magazines are to be used, in which particular magazines should ads be placed? The following two approaches can be used in media selection: cost-per-thousand-contacts comparison and matching of audience and medium characteristics. Cost-per-Thousand-Contacts Comparison. The cost-per-thousand-contacts comparison has traditionally been the most popular method of media selection. Although simple to apply, the cost-per-thousand method leaves much to be desired. Basing media selection entirely on the number of contacts to be reached ignores the quality of contacts made. For example, an advertisement for a women’s dress line appearing in Vogue would make a greater impact on those exposed to it than would the same ad appearing in True Confessions. Similarly, Esquire would perhaps be more appropriate than many less-specialized magazines for introducing men’s fashions. Further, the cost-per-thousand method can be highly misleading if one considers the way in which advertisers define the term exposure. According to the media definition, exposure occurs as soon as an ad is inserted in the magazine. Whether the exposure actually occurs is never considered. This method also fails to consider editorial images and the impact power of different channels of a medium. Matching of Audience and Media Characteristics. An alternative approach to media selection is to specify the target audience and match its characteristics to a particular medium. A step-by-step procedure for using this method is described as follows:

1. Build a profile of customers, detailing who they are, where they are located, when they can be reached, and what their demographic characteristics are. Setting media objectives (discussed earlier) is helpful in building customer profiles.

2. Study media profiles in terms of audience coverage. Implicit in this step is the study of the audience’s media habits (i.e., an examination of who constitutes a particular medium’s audience).

3. Match customer profiles to media profiles. The customer characteristics for a product should be matched to the audience characteristics of different media. This comparison should lead to the preliminary selection of a medium, based primarily on the grounds of coverage.

4. The preliminary selection should be examined further in regard to product and cost considerations. For some products, other things being equal, one medium is superior to another. For example, in the case of beauty aids, a product demonstration is helpful; hence, television would be a better choice than radio. Cost is another concern in media selection; information on cost is available from the media themselves. Cost should be balanced against the benefit expected from the campaign under consideration.

5. Finally, the total budget should be allocated to different media and to various media vehicles. The final selection of a medium should maximize the achievement of media objectives. For example, if the objective is to make people aware of a product, then the medium selected should be the one that reaches a wide audience. Basically, two types of information are required for media selection: customer profile and media characteristics. The advertiser should build a customer profile for his or her product/market. Information about various media is usually available from media owners. Practically all media owners have complete information available to them concerning their audiences (demographics and circulation figures). Each medium, however, presents the information in a way that makes it look best. It is desirable, therefore, to validate the audience information supplied by media owners with data from bureaus that audit various media. The Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Traffic Audit Bureau, and the Business Publications Audit of Circulation are examples of such audit bureaus.