Way too many small businesses waste a large percentage of their promotional budget because of misconceptions they have about advertising. Strangely enough, they hang on to these misapprehensions in the face of repeated failure, giving credence to the odd notion that it’s somehow preferable to pay for your own bad ideas than it is to pay for better ones that may be more profitable.
So, in the interest of business success, I’d like to shed some light on a couple or three of the myths about advertising that I’ve encountered over 44 years in the business.
Advertising may be necessary, but it’s too expensive. Well, advertising does cost money and it isexpense. An expense is defined as an outlay or expenditure for a service or good. If you by a new digital camera, for example, you might think it’s expensive because it cost you $2,500. But, if you’re a photographer, and you plan to use that camera to make money, then it’s an investment, not an expense. Your $2,500 may earn you $50,000 this year, so now it’s a pretty cheap deal, unless, of course, the camera doesn’t work. It’s exactly the same with advertising; it’s an investment that you should expect to make you money in return. The better you are at doing your advertising (just like getting better with that new digital camera) the more money it’s going to make for you. Not really expensive at all. necessary for most businesses, so technically that’s right. But first off, advertising is not an
Advertising is all about being creative. Maybe the king of all misnomers, this notion suggests that all you need to do to have effective advertising is to find a clever way to get a message out. In rare instances, this may be true, but 99% of the time, advertising is successful because of all the work that is done before the “creatives” are called in.
Things like audience profiling, key benefit identification, product positioning, creative strategy development, defining desired response and countless other less-glamorous activities are the real keys to creating great advertising campaigns. If a message doesn’t say the right thing to the right people, at the right time and elicit the right response, it makes no difference how creative it is, it’s simply not going to be effective.
The Internet is killing advertising. I suppose all the Internet gurus and social media mouthpieces who don’t understand advertising support this assertion, but the facts don’t. The Internet is just another communications medium, albeit a significant one. It brings a faster two-way dynamic to the communications process and certainly broadens scope of targeting and analytics, but these are not new concepts to the practice of advertising. Computers didn’t kill TV; TV didn’t kill radio; radio didn’t kill newspapers and so forth. Businesses still have to get their selling and positioning messages out to their audiences, and that will not be a “free” process in any case. Consider that Internet activities like social media use, though perceived as less costly than traditional media in many contexts, require vast amounts of time to organize, create, implement, analyze and act upon. This “time” is costly to any business, quite often more so than using “traditional” means of advertising because of difficulty in interpreting and using the results. Unquestionably, the Internet will change the face of advertising, but it certainly is not going to kill it.
Productivity remains the key, and as advertising evolves with technology, its definition will remain the same: paid messages delivered through mass media in order to persuade and inform a desired audience as to the benefits of a product, service or belief. Advertising is complex and demanding, and the more small business can replace some of their myths about the profession with facts, the more successful they will become.
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