Advertising and Promotion: An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective 11th Edition

Book Preface

THE CHANGING WORLD OF ADVERTISING AND PROMOTION

Nearly everyone in the modern world is influenced to some degree by advertising and other forms of promotion. Organizations in both the private and public sectors have learned that the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently with their target audiences is critical to their success. Advertising and other types of promotional messages are used to sell products and services as well as to promote causes, market political candidates, and deal with societal problems such as alcohol and drug abuse. Consumers are finding it increasingly difficult to avoid the efforts of marketers, who are constantly searching for new ways to communicate with them.

Most of the people involved in advertising and promotion will tell you that there is no more dynamic and fascinating field to either practice or study. However, they will also tell you that the field is undergoing dramatic transformations that are changing the ways marketers communicate with consumers forever. The changes are coming from all sides—clients demanding better results from their advertising and promotional dollars; lean but highly creative smaller ad agencies; sales promotion and direct-marketing firms, as well as interactive agencies, that want a larger share of the billions of dollars companies spend each year promoting their products and services; consumers who have changed the ways they respond to traditional forms of advertising; new media and new technologies that are reshaping the ways marketers communicate with consumers. We are experiencing perhaps the most dynamic and revolutionary changes of any era in the history of marketing, as well as advertising and promotion. These changes are being driven by advances in technology and developments that have led to the rapid growth of communications through digital media, particularly the

Internet, social media, and mobile devices. Companies from outside the traditional advertising industry are rapidly changing the process of making and delivering advertising messages to consumers. Marketers are looking beyond traditional mass-media advertising to find new and more effective ways to communicate with their target audiences. They recognize there are numerous ways to reach their current and prospective customers and bring them into contact with their products and services. Many marketers view digital ads as a more cost-effective way to reach specific target markets and measure the results of their marketing efforts. Major changes are taking place in the way marketers are using the Internet for marketing communications, including new applications that facilitate interactive information sharing and collaboration and bilateral, as opposed to unilateral, communication. Web 2.0 developments mean that digital users are no longer limited to the passive viewing of information and can interact with one another as well as companies and/ or organizations. These applications have led to the development of social networking sites, video sharing sites, blogs, and online communities which have all experienced explosive growth. A little more than a decade ago Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn did not even exist. Facebook now has more than 1.6 billion users around the world, Twitter boasts over 300 million, and nearly 5 billion videos are viewed each day on YouTube, including many of the TV commercials and other promotional videos created by marketers. Nearly all companies or organizations have a Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter page that they use to keep in constant contact with their customers while many marketers are also beginning to use Snapchat to reach younger consumers. These tools, along with other types of social media, have become an integral part of most marketers’ marketing communications programs. However, the increased use of the Internet and social media is only the latest in a number of fundamental changes that have been occurring in the way companies plan, develop, and execute their marketing communications programs.

For decades the advertising business was dominated by large, full-service Madison Avenue–type agencies. The advertising strategy for a national brand involved creating one or two commercials that could be run on network television, a few print ads that would run in general-interest magazines, and some sales promotion support such as coupons or premium offers. However, in today’s world there are a myriad of media outlets— print, radio, cable and satellite TV, and mobile to mention a few—competing for consumers’ attention. Marketers are looking beyond traditional media to find new and better ways to communicate with their customers because they no longer accept on faith the value of conventional advertising placed in traditional media. Major marketers have moved away from a reliance just on mass-media advertising and are spending more of their marketing communications budgets in specialized media that target specific markets. Companies are also spending more of their monies in other ways such as event marketing, sponsorships, cause-related promotions, and viral marketing. Advertising agencies are recognizing that they must change the way they do business.

In addition to redefining the role and nature of their advertising agencies, marketers are changing the way they communicate with consumers. They know they are operating in an environment where advertising messages are everywhere, consumers channel-surf past most TV commercials, and brands promoted in traditional ways often fail. New-age advertisers are redefining the notion of what an ad is and where it runs. Stealth messages are being woven into the culture and embedded into movies and TV shows or made into their own form of entertainment. Many experts argue that “branded content” is the wave of the future, and there is a growing movement to reinvent advertising and other forms of marketing communication to be more akin to entertainment. Companies are using branded entertainment as a way of reaching consumers by creating short films that can be viewed online, arranging product placements, and integrating their brands into movies and television shows to promote their products and services.