Many small and medium sized businesses I interact with seem to have the view that advertising and marketing are synonyms, and if they had a bit more money in their marketing budgets, it would best be spent on advertising.
Rarely is that the case.
Advertising is just a part of a marketing menu, often crucial and a voracious consumer of dollars, but nevertheless often a small part.
Advertising is a great tool, a device to achieve all sorts of commercial ends, but like any tool, there are limits.
The babble that usually accompanies the sales pitch for advertising is often long on superlatives and short on specifics.
Here is what advertising cannot do:
Advertising weight is no substitute for creativity.
Messages only really get absorbed when they appeal to our hearts, and most advertising appeals to our brains. Like all rules, there are exceptions, such as the advertising of a once only limited time price deal. No heart in that, all head, and it may be seen, and it may also be destructive of the brand, as it is commoditising it.
Advertising cannot make people care about something that has no relevance to them.
Look at all the advertising done for starving kids in Africa, soliciting 10 bucks a month to save a life. If we really cared, rather than felt guilty, the coffers would be running over. It is not that we do not abhor the fact that kids die of malnutrition, it is just that it is removed from us, has no personal impact, and we are cynical about how much of our 10 bucks is actually getting to the people who need it. Advertising is best when it defines the WIFM to those seeing it. The best copywriters are usually the direct response writers, they know immediately when their adverting works, and they are always appealing to the prospects top of mind self interest.
Advertising rarely increases the size of a market in the short term.
The purpose of advertising is to attract your competitors existing users, lapsed users, or light users to your products or service. From time to time advertising latches onto a latent need and does create a market, such as the great Apple advertising for the first macs or even better, DeBeers programs to create the tradition of a diamond engagement ring, but those take bucket loads of money, beyond the capacity of any medium advertiser, as well as great timing and a level of creativity rarely seen. Most advertising is aimed at nicking your competitors customers, in one way or another. When I had to turn around Ski yogurt, the target was Yoplait. There was no mistaking what we set out to do by offering a product that was distinctly different, had a different value proposition, but it was still yoghurt. Over time the combined activity increased the size of the market considerably, but our advertising target was Yoplait users and we got them by taking a stance on yogurt that had discernible pieces of fruit in it, rather than being a homogeneous product, and the taste was distinctly different, so there was a choice to be made once we persuaded consumers to trial.
The question of which channel to use for your advertising is a whole set of different questions.
Digital or analogue, is usually the first step, and the logical answer is ‘both’ as there is no one right answer. Each channel and each platform within the channel plays a different role, and has different costs and outcome expectations. It can get very complicated, and the only sensible way to sort out the mess, and conflicting claims is to be very clear about the objectives you have, then assess each advertising option against the objectives, and the value they deliver.
