The Technology of Advertising

Why top management does not believe advertising to business is worthwhile

Many CEO’s regard the advertising function as somewhat more important than painting the offices every five years, and just as important as, um, uh, company cars? No. Bonuses? Well, no. The annual picnic? Maybe. In fact, since the company picnic went the way of all dispensables a few years ago, surviving ad programs now jockey for the last place “in order of importance to the company’s bottom line.”

Because we mostly tend act on our beliefs, few right-thinking CEO’s therefore find it sensible to staff the advertising function with credentialed, confident communications professionals , and they too rarely permit a budget above the level of self-fulfilling prophecy. “Those people want an ad program? OK, you can run an ad or two in ‘FRAXIS TECHNOLOGY TODAY’ – that’ll get ‘em off your back.”

Few of us professionals have taken the trouble to explain the workings of advertising for business or industrial products and services. It’s no surprise then that management derives its understanding of what it’s about – and how to do it – from reruns of “Thirty-Something”, from a friend at the club, or from someone who zipped through the ad manager’s job on the way to a real job with prestige and clout.

Rarely has management been shown the technology advertising research findings of Westinghouse, or GE, or the massive study done by the Strategic Planning Institute in Cambridge, Mass. o n cause-effect between advertising, market share and profitability. Nor has anyone ever explained the three basic variables, “R-F-I”, and why they must be in balance or the campaign must fizzle. Such deficits also explain the birth of the many dismal ads found in the journals. Ads with selling propositions that might have come from the meter-reader. And insertion schedules that equate to pumping enough fuel into an airliner to fly it only one-third of the way across the Atlantic.

So help me, one company published an ad that, embarrassingly, likens its workaday technical products to a space ship, using “Synergy!” and other mindless rantings that would get a salesperson laughed out of a sales call in nanoseconds.

Well, that covers a few dimensions of the problem. But what’s to be done?

To begin with, CEO’s can only deal with meaningful information. Not with cliché’s, not with feel-good truisms about “getting the word out”, or because “The other guys are doing it”, or to keep the sales force pacified.

It is possible to establish and track the real value of advertising (including direct mail, publicity, and ads), and it’s like tracking the performance of the Dow-Jones. Over time, it pays very well; in the short term, it costs.

So? So don’t get into it unless you view it and handle it as an investment-grade decision, with all that implies. If advertising programs can do what we say they can do, then it’s worth asking up front, “Specifically, what task is to be done with this program, and why, and when?”

If the best answer anyone gives is, “Just to get our name out there”, better to put the budget into penny stocks, or simply take an antacid and forget the subject ever came up.

Without a disciplined program, you are firing shorts aimlessly into the jungle, and pretty soon you will conclude, “Using guns is a lousy way to hunt tigers”. It’s not the guns; it’s the gunners, as one prominent general pointed out.

Secondly, developing the story your ads tell must be given the same care that a good manager devotes to major presentations. Business prospects are unimpressed when your ad is merely “attractive” or dripping with adjectives. They’re impressed when the ad provides them with a grasp of the special value of the thing advertised.

Advertising is not an end in itself; it’s a tool that plays a serious role in nurturing new business growth, but only when it’s performed according to the established rules and not by whimsy.

If you’d like to see how we practice what we preach, then we’ll be happy to show you documented new business results including eye -openers where management originally felt, “We already know who buys our products and services; why do we need advertising?”