The Role of Advertising

Identifying and defining the importance and the role for advertising is fundamental to achieving excellence in advertising, because it stands as a clear ‘stake in the ground' in the whole development process. If this role is not well defined - for example, if it is left ambiguous, inaccurate or unclear – then there are no solid foundations for developing an advertising strategy and there is no basis for a meaningful research or evaluation. In fact, ill-defining the role for advertising might lead to other problems (like targeting, proposition, etc.) and because of all these, the advertisement could not meet its objectives. The example that best illustrates this is the following: when Lord Leverhulme famously said he knew that half of his advertising was wasted, but he did not know which half, the answer was the half whose role had not been properly identified and defined.

However, there are some communication tasks to which advertising is particularly suited. The first one concerns especially the food and drink categories; here, advertising is used in the almost ‘classic' sense of delivering a consistent, ‘added value' message on behalf of a brand, lifting an everyday product out of the ordinary. Second, advertising is clearly useful when the communications objectives require the building of emotional brand values as well as the delivery of a rational proposition and the category that best illustrates this is clothing. Third, advertising is good at spreading ‘new news' quickly and widely, like in the case of Daewoo cars. Fourth, advertising can benefit a brand enormously by putting on public display products that have relatively discrete target audience. Fifth, advertising is particularly useful when a company's communication needs to serve as a catalyst, or agenda setter, for its entire modus operandi. And finally, an advertising campaign is very efficient when it comes to the need to talk to all of the people all of the time.

Determining the importance and role of advertising

After identifying the fact that there is a role for advertising, the next step is defining what that role is. Here, the difficulty is that it depends on the context. For example, on one hand, the role for advertising is to communicate the proposition to the target audience in the right tone of voice but, on the other hand, it has the role to play ‘beyond the strategy'. However, the role for advertising must ‘fit' with the marketing objectives. (Leslie Butterfield, 1999, p. 72)

The effectiveness of advertising depends on the advertiser's proper attitudes. Thus, the most important attitude is an appreciation of the limits of advertising, which must never be viewed as a miracle cure, which can instantly generate sales and turn around a dying business. For example, if product integrity is lacking, all the advertising in the world will not save the product and likewise, advertising is useless if the market does not want the product. The second most important attitude that must be present if advertising is to succeed is responsibility. This refers to coherence between an advertisement and the product or service it describes: the closer an ad approaches the reality of the product or service being offered, the more effective it is. At the same time, effective advertising must be characterised by simplicity, which refers to the fact that the product or service must be described as simply as possible, in terms a prospective buyer can easily understand and relate to. This shows just some of teh complexities involved in describing the role of advertising. Technical terms are used only as necessary to support an argument, every aspect of the ad being prepared from the customer's point of view. The third attitude is a willingness to apply the test of appropriateness to all aspects of an advertising programme, for example, ‘does it work?' Because advertising deals with subjective elements like words and visual images, it is very easy to let emotions gain the upper hand and thus, choices end up being made on the basis of the opinion – ‘I like it' – rather than fact – ‘Let's test the ad's effectiveness in one market before running it nationally'. In this case, decisions must be made on the basis of the appropriateness of the creativity, the budget and the media to the task to be accomplished.