Toolkit: Making an ad

Phil H · Posted: 24th May, 2007 7:35 am UTC Post subject: Toolkit: Making an ad

Marketing & PR. Getting customers and keeping them without

breaking the bank. (2007) Philip R Holden and Nick Wilde.

London, A&C Black.

Toolkit: Making an ad

The technical expertise to make an advertisement for different media (press, radio, TV) varies enormously, obviously. However, the principles for producing a great idea for an ad or for direct mail are the same.

What’s the point?
Before you even write your ad, you need to be very clear what it is doing for you. Have a clear objective. Sketching out a flow diagram of your campaign is often a useful exercise. Start with the target audience and end up with the change you want to bring about.
Are the customers you want to target currently buying from your competitors? Do they know about you? Are they reading your ad at their desks, in a conference, over breakfast? Do you want them to pick up the phone? Should they visit you? Can they look at your website? And the key question after all this is, why should they do any of the above?

Targeting
The most important thing to get right is the audience (see the toolkits on ‘buying a mailing list’ and ‘putting together a direct mailing’). Look at the ‘pyramid’ diagram in Chapter 8.
Don’t assume that the medium you are most aware of is the best for your product, get some audience figures to back it up. The measure of media efficiency is ‘cost per thousand’; a thousand, that is, of the people you need to talk to.

The mechanics
The mechanics are the physical properties of the advertising, especially the means by which potential customers can respond. There is no place for advertising that doesn’t get a measurable response, so always have at least one response mechanism (such as a phone number or e-mail address), and ideally include two or three.
The you need to think about how you will persuade your audience to respond. Why not think about giving the product away free, perhaps through a competition? Local radio stations, newspapers and trade magazines love these and no matter how dull some people think your product is, competitions are a great way of attracting interest.

Time is always of the essence
Don’t leave your campaign planning to the last minute and don’t advertise simply because a magazine is doing a ‘special offer’. Instead, make sure you have plenty of time to plan your campaign and to look ahead in your diary to see if there are significant events for your customers. For example, is there an important trade fair coming up? Is the local football team about to face a Premiership side in the FA Cup? If so, how can you make best use of it?

Brief an agency or DIY?
It’s becoming easier to ‘do’ advertising yourself but, as with all marketing exercises, you have to pause and think about this really hard. It’s better not to advertise at all than to run advertising that damages your image because it looks cheap or is full of errors.
It’s increasingly the case that small local advertising agencies can produce world-class work for reasonable sums. If you find an agency you want to work with, be upfront about the budget, spend time with them on the briefing process and use the work you’ve already done in developing your central campaign idea. Creativity thrives on a tight budget (and you have our permission to tell the agencies that).
As an alternative, newspapers, magazines and radio stations often have their own creative people whose services can be negotiated as part of an advertising package – for example, in return for running the advertising for two months instead of a few weeks. It depends on how hard you negotiate.

Booking ad space
Buying ad space is like buying any commodity – it’s totally perishable (see Chapter 6). If the ad sales people don’t book you in by the copy deadline for this week’s edition, then they can’t sell the space to you at all. The costs to a newspaper of carrying your are minimal, so you can negotiate. In fact, always negotiate; you should never pay the ‘rate card’ price.
It’s the same with radio stations, especially local ones, which also have space to fill. No commercial medium can afford empty space or dead airtime, so sometimes advertising is even carried free. For obvious reasons stations or publications like to give this to charities or to big, regular customers, but they may also be persuaded to help out a new advertiser.
It’s worthwhile developing a relationship with the media since they have useful information on their audiences and may have research that you can use – don’t be afraid to ask. The more interesting and unique your business, the more likely they are to want to give you more coverage. See Chapter 8 in 'Marketing and PR' .

Location, location…
It’s not just what you put in an advertisement that matters. You also have to consider where and when it appears. There is a kind of rule that doubling the size of an ad doesn’t necessarily double its impact. It also follows that halving the size of an ad doesn’t halve its effect. In practice, you’re more often restrained by the budget and the copy (the words and pictures) you need to fit in. As far as possible, in English language press, insist on a right hand page: readers’ attention falls on those pages as they leaf through publications.
More important is to understand when the right kinds of people are listening or which pages they are reading. Advertising sales people may be reluctant to tell you and may even try and exclude you from certain areas. They will almost certainly take your interest in a particular ‘position’ as a cue to push up the price. But think laterally.
If they tell you that a small ad in the property pages costs the same as a much larger ad amongst all the car dealerships, ask them about it. If your ad is attractive or unusual, try and sell it to them. If you’re selling £75,000 cars, you probably would rather be in front of readers looking at £2 million houses than next to a garage selling second-hand cars.

Remember the bigger picture
Don’t lose sight of the whole campaign. Your advertising has to have a specific objective and you must have a way of measuring it (this is normally done by adding up the number of direct responses to the ads). If it doesn’t work, then you have to be big enough to admit it and move on.

Other sources
To find advertising agencies, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising have a searchable directory of members at: www.ipa.co.uk.
Smaller agencies are often members of the Marketing Communications Consultants Association. Visit: www.mcca.org.uk.

For useful insights into how to advertise in radio, newspapers and other media, look at:
• The Radio Advertising Bureau – www.rab.co.uk (free to register)
• The Newspaper Marketing Agency (also has useful case studies about how press advertising is planned) – www.nmauk.co.uk

Now, please post your comments and experience. Have you started to plan advertising for a small organisation? Have we helped?

(c) 2007 Philip R Holden & Nick Wilde