Advertising and Promotions: Notes, Assignments, Projects

New businesses need to make people aware of their business, products and services. Established businesses need to make people aware of their new products and also ensure they do not switch loyalties. And that is where advertising is so important for any business. While advertising is important for businesses, it is also important for consumers as they become more aware of the various offerings. Find notes, assignments, projects related to advertising and promotions.

Advertising campaigns for companies and brands

An essential part of running any business is its marketing and advertising efforts, required for branding of the company as well as for building a base of customers. In the long run, every company wants to have a loyal customer base that periodically purchase goods and services from the company.

A company might be good at making high-quality goods and offering great services at competitive prices, but in order to generate sales, people should know about these products & services. And that is why companies spend on advertising.

There was a time when advertising was limited to mediums such as television, radio, and newspapers; advertising was competitive and marketers witnessed several entertaining marketing campaigns. Today, the medium has become wider and more complex, but the need to attract people’s attention, push more sales, and change people’s impression about a particular brand or company is still alive.

Benefits

A strong and well-thought out advertising campaign can offer several benefits for a business.

• Advertising helps in the sale of products / services. Businesses need to continually market their products to people, in order to make them aware of their existence. Without advertising, people will not know about the products, which will have an impact on the sales of the products. Consistent and effective advertising campaigns help products to thrive in the marketplace. Holidays, festivals are important times of the year when companies spend on advertising campaigns as people are in the mood to spend during these periods.
• Advertising also helps make people become aware about new product launches. Any company that is planning to introduce new products in the market has to spend on advertising. Advertising not only creates awareness about the product, but clever campaigns can even arouse ‘need’ in potential customers towards their new products. However, without advertising, a company will not be able to give a new product any chance to survive in the market (and even if it survives, it could take a long time for it to make a name for itself)
• Another important benefit of advertising is that it makes a brand more visible. For new businesses or businesses that operate within industries that suffer from poor perception, advertising can create a more favourable impression about the company and make people aware of its capabilities and offerings. So advertising campaigns can help increase the visibility of a company’s brand.

Advertising helps businesses attract new customers and help them sell more products and services to existing customers. Whether you conduct your advertising campaign online, television, newspapers or other print resources, it helps raise the visibility of a company’s brand and the products that it wants to sell.

Challenges

While there are several benefits of running advertising campaigns, companies should also be aware of the downsides of launching advertising campaigns.

One major downside of an advertising campaign is cost. It requires time and money to launch an advertising campaign. Another thing is that after an advertising campaign is launched, one cannot say for sure how many customers it will bring in. Another problem is that competitors may notice your advertising campaign and take appropriate actions. Competitors may launch their own advertising campaigns to maintain or increase their market share. They could open more locations or even lower the prices, forcing other businesses to do the same in order to retain customers. However, despite the challenges, every business must consider advertising because of their potential to bring in additional sales.

Running an advertising campaign costs money, which means a company must give thoughtful consideration to the cost-benefit ratio of every advertising campaign that it plans to launch. If the money a company spends to reach its customers exceeds the value those customers bring in, the investment may not be worth it unless the company only wants to create greater awareness for the brand. Companies should consider the cost of media placements, give more thought to likely results of the campaign before taking the plunge. After the campaign is launched, companies must also evaluate the results thoroughly so that the learnings can be applied to their next campaign.

How to Write a Creative Brief for Advertising Projects (Examples)

How to write a Creative Brief for advertising projects, with examples.

Constructing a Creative Brief

Things to remember:

• Advertising Objectives: Why are we advertising?
• Target Audience: Who are we talking to?
• Motivations, Thoughts & Feelings: Target audience motivations
• Brand positioning: Proposition/Positioning statement
• Primary Outcome: Single most important thing / take away

Requirements for the Creative Brief

Develop and present a verbal pitch to seek a prospective client’s approval of a 12-month ‘Ad Campaign’. Develop ad campaign – big idea and the strategy.

Take on the role of a full-service marketing agency intending to pitch for the prospective client’s account on the basis of the brief from the client.

Brief from the Client:

Develop a fresh advertising campaign for (the year) for our organization’s line of goods and services. This is a city based campaign. Your advertising campaign needs to improve our brand image by building on our customers’ current perception of the brand’s value. All advertising campaigns will run for one year (start date) to (end date) with an advertising budget of (budget amount).

Your Market Area: Map of the City

Get Answers to These Questions

Agree a creative brief with the client by answering the following questions:

• What is the essence of our products?
• Who is the competition?
• Who is the audience?
• What customer needs/problems do we address?
• What do our customers currently think about us?
• What ‘one thing’ do we want them to believe?
• What can we tell them that will make them believe this?
• What is the ‘tonality’ of the current ad campaign?

Situational Analysis

Develop a situation analysis of the prospective client’s organization, especially from a marketing perspective to include: commercial sector analysis, competitive analysis, strategy analysis, customer analysis (B2B and B2C, as appropriate)
macro-environmental analysis, microenvironmental analysis.

Strategy

Provide the Big Idea.

Develop an ad campaign ‘strategy’ including: campaign objectives, target audience, creative approach, media choices, scheduling details, costing and effectiveness measurement.

Budgeting

You are expected to create and outline a realistic budget. Your budget is (Amount).

Make realistic assumptions about: the length of the overall campaign, your choice of media, the money allocated to each medium, production costs, agency fees/commissions, contingency reserves and so forth.
These elements need to be spelled out precisely in your budgetary breakdown.

Brand Essence – The Wheel

The Brand Essence Wheel is sort of a template that helps define a brand.

• How does the product or brand affect the customer?
• How can the customer best describe the product?
• What does the customer look like when using the product?
• what does the customer feel like when using the brand?

Tone of Voice

The character of your brand as expressed through the written word is the Tone of Voice. It’s about what (values) you say and how (personality) you say it.

Steps to Make a Creative Brief

Tagging the heart of a brand:

Brainstorms a list of words that personify the heart of each of these brands.
Example for a dog food product: Healthy, Lively, Fit, Muscular, Energetic, Delicious, Organic, Tasty, Nutritious, ad more.

A positioning statement:

A positioning statement is an expression of how a given product, service or brand fills a particular consumer need in a way that its competitors don’t.  Positioning is the process of identifying an appropriate market niche for a product (or service or brand) and getting it established in that area.

Example:

• Peteatable will be your dogs new best friend offering delicious and healthy chewable treats.
• Peteatable are a snack you were looking for your dogs all the time, healthy and delicious in one box.
• Peteatable a healthy nutritious treat to keep your dogs wagging their tails.
• Each bite is packed with protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals and more.
• Peteatable is your day to day healthy treat for your dog so even your dog can be healthy and nutritious.

What is the very essence of our products?
Organic treat

Who/what is our competition?
Pedigree, Purina, Royal Canine, Carnilove, Taste of the Wild, Baby Blue

Who are we talking to?
Health conscious dog owners, aged 25-40 family maybe kids, villa living

What customer needs/problems do we address?
Lack of good quality organic products (treats) for dogs.

What do our customers currently think about us?
We are the experts for healthy dog treats + have best quality organic

What ‘one thing’ do we want them to believe?
Trust and believe organic means organic + healthy

What can we tell them that will make them believe this?
Rich full of fibre, vitamins and natural ingredients

What is the ‘tonality’ of the current ad campaign?
Cheerful, Honest and Friendly

Questions and Answers

Management (MBA) question on advertising campaigns:

Question: Development of advertising and campaign, creation of content using different channels and evaluation of key metrics for measurement. The content page of communication plan: Introduction (Brand and its positioning, Background to the job). Campaign objectives and Measures. Customers to be targeted/ Target Audience Analysis. Key Messaging. Creative strategy/ Big Idea. Media plan. Budgetary considerations. Scheduling considerations. Discussion of campaign effectiveness testing. Conclusion. Appendix: Creative Brief, Mock up of your creative work.

Question: Disney’s 2021 and 2020 Christmas adverts ‘The Stepdad’ and ‘From Our Family to Yours’ depict Filipino culture and portray blended and multi-racial families. The ads have received positive comments from target audiences and the general public. Critically evaluate the extent to which these ads are examples of the adoption of standardisation, localisation or glocalisation in advertising strategy.

Question: Critically discuss the major challenges facing the advertising industry in the postdigital, post-Covid-19 era. In your answer, pay particular attention to issues arising from the convergence of media channels via the Internet, the importance of user-generated content (UGC) and emotional storytelling as creative strategy on multiple digital platforms. Use examples where relevant to support your points.

Question: Using recent examples of advertising campaigns to illustrate your points, critically discuss how ethical principles might be applied to the regulation of advertising in a diverse and market-driven society. Apply virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism or religious ethics in your response to support your discussion and points.

Question: Advertising practitioners have increasingly adopted storytelling as part of their advertising strategy and according to Forbes (2019), storytelling is the future of marketing. Critically discuss how storytelling can benefit brand organisations in their content advertising strategies. Use examples to support your answers where possible.

Question: Nike’s 2018 advertising campaign ‘Just Do It’ featuring former NFL star Colin Kaepernick generated a strong media reaction and resonated with the #BlackLivesMatter movement but Gillette’s 2019 ‘We Believe’ addressing the trending topic of toxic masculinity, and Pepsi’s 2017 advert ‘Live for Now’ featuring Kendal Jenner, received less positive media reaction. Drawing on the concepts of intertextuality and polysemy, critically discuss why these three advertisements might have provoked such widely varying reactions.

Question: Critically discuss uses of qualitative and quantitative research in advertising. The focus of your discussion should be on the role of research at each stage of the creative advertising development process, and the importance of qualitative research in advertising. You should use examples to support your points.

Question: Critically discuss the major challenges facing the advertising industry in the post-digital, post-Covid-19 era. In your answer, pay particular attention to issues arising from the convergence of media channels via the Internet, the importance of user-generated content (UGC) and emotional storytelling as creative strategy on multiple digital platforms. Use examples where relevant to support your points

Question: (a)What is comparative advertising? What are its advantages and disadvantages?
(b)What are the advantages and disadvantages of “Focus Groups” in testing advertising?

Question: (i) Explain the terms reach and frequency. When is reach more important than frequency and vica-versa?
(ii) What are the basic tasks that a media planner and operations person performs in an agency? Explain

Question: “An Account Planner acts as the voice of the consumer in the Advertising development process.” What is meant by this and what exactly does an Account Planner do in an Ad agency? Discuss his role in he context of complete planning cycle.

Question: Assume you are working as the Marketing Manager of SRS Cinemas, a new Cineplex that has come up next to PVR in Saket. While PVR is the best known Brand in Cineplex’s, no one knows SRS cinemas. You need to make the marketing strategy, and allocate a budget for mass media advertising.
a) What % of budget will you allocate to Advertising and what method will you select? Why?
b) In your estimate, will Advertising directly aid in getting people to the Cineplex?
c) Can a strategy that relies on ticket discounts & promotions (for example, 4th ticket free if you buy 3 tickets for the same show) succeed much better than Advertising? Give reasons for your agreement or disagreement.

Question: How companies and brands can benefit from advertising campaigns?
Select two advertising campaigns and develop what you think are/were the objectives of the campaigns. compare and critically discuss how has the message-design achieved/attempted to achieve these objectives? (2000 words)
All written submissions must be properly Harvard referenced. Include references and appendices.

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