The advertising campaign is produced to achieve a purpose, to achieve what the advertiser desires, or needs. Advertising succeeds if it meets its requirements. It fails if it does not do so. The problem is that there is considerable room for misunderstanding or disagreement. One person may contend that the advertising looks good, says the right thing and has been a great help. Someone else in the organisation maintains that the advertising was irrelevant, did not mean anything and was a waste of time. Both probably work from different assumptions. They look for different things.

Advertising does not work in the abstract. It sets out to meet a concrete need, with a specific response. As an example, Guinness was developing a down-market image and was being eroded by brighter, lighter drinks. It needed a counter-claim. Hence, ‘Guinness Is Genius’, conveyed via bright, provocative and modern images. A positioning objective, met by a positioning response. Specific aims, specific programme.

Indeed, the more specific the advertising objective, the more helpful and the more specific can be the campaign development. Advertising - like most commercial processes - works by being precise: the more precise, the more effective.

Targeting must be precise, media selection must be precise, creative thinking must be precise and all have to spring from a precise statement of objectives. The first function of the advertiser, the moment the time has come to consider an advertising programme, begins with the establishment of objectives. All else springs from this.

The question, of course, is who exactly sets these objectives? There is room for confusion. An objective must always be set. But it can originate from a number of sources:

- the person in charge of the advertising: the advertising manager, or product manager, or communications manager

- the marketing director, in charge of the complete marketing effect

- the corporate management: the department director, or the corporate chairman, or the Board

- another department which needs to use the advertising for its own purpose, eg the sales force

- the advertising consultant or service, such as the advertising agency.

Objectives may proceed from a mix of all five, but on the whole it is wise for the communications manager to act both as an originator and a coordinator of these various forces. That is, he or she consults any other department concerned (such as sales), checks back with and takes advice from the management level, formulates a statement of objectives, then checks it back again with the management and obtains formal approval.

The communications manager is the communications professional and has the communications responsibility - and therefore rightly should formulate the marketing need into communications terms. The sales force is allowed to put their point of view forward and the finance department is consulted on the financial and costing aspects but it’s the communications manager who is at the centre of the objectives-setting process.

The managing director or Chief Executive officer needs both to state what is required from the management level, and to give approval to the final proposed statement of objectives. The advertising agency (if one is used) is informed about the objectives, may be asked an opinion but in the end has to act under the organisation’s instructions - and does not have the ultimate responsibility for setting objectives.

Many would not wish to do so. In smaller organisations, a single person may at one and the same time combine both the management and communications roles.

And in large organisations, a department director (eg marketing director) may assume the management role. But common to all is the one single priority: to set a clear, accurate, sensible and practical set of objectives, with everyone in agreement. It should also be said that objectives can take two forms:

- the simple, and informal, where one individual may quickly brief another, perhaps verbally and without complication

- the formal, the written and the detailed.

The former is no doubt satisfactory for smaller campaigns, or incidental one-off advertisements. But for anything requiring considerable expenditures, on which major outcomes rely, there is no substitute for a detailed, formal statement, usually in written form.