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A company’s promotional-mix strategies and programs include many components from which, it chooses some options to apply at a particular time in order to promote its products. The promotional-mix includes the following components:

Some other forms of promotion include: free samples or free trials, coupons, bonuses, prizes on games, lucky draws, seminar sales, expo sales, conference sales, etc. Such companies place advertisements in the magazines, TV, internet, or mail letters and brochures to the customers, or make telephone calls or confer toll free numbers and when customers prescribe their products; the order is shipped to them.

ADVERTISING DEFINED. Advertising is a way of communication about goods, services, and ideas by organizations through mass media in order to promote products, businesses, or influence behavior.

2nd DEFINITION. ‘Advertising is a paid, non personal (i.e. not for a particular person but focused to a group of people) communication of information about goods, services and ideas by an identified sponsor through mass media, which is intended to influence or persuade behavior.’ Influencing the behavior of ad viewers may be for a number of reasons like creating awareness about products, selling products, appeal for raising charity funds or to vote for candidates, job interviews, corporate image shining ads, and so on.

INFORMAL DEFINITION. Advertising is about persuasive messages about goods, services, ideas, and institutions through media.

ADVERTISER is the company sponsoring an advertising / ad / commercial of a product.

ADVERTISING AGENCY is the company producing an ad for an advertiser.

CHARACTERISTICS OF ADVERTISING. Commercials are made for different types of customers (such as consumers or business customers), launched in a particular territory (ies) (such as from local to national level) in a specific medium or media (such as Geo TV, ARY, Daily Dawn, Jang News, etc) with some pre-planned purposes (such as to increase the sales, etc).


PURPOSES / OBJECTIVES OF ADVERTISING
1 to create awareness about the product (esp’ at the time of new product launching); 2 to urge product use; 3 to increase the sale of product; 4 to differentiate the product from competitors; 5 to expand product distribution; 6 to increase brand preference and loyalty; 7 to raise funds for charity reasons; 8 to appeal voters to vote a particular candidate; 9 job interview ads; 10 public notices; 11 auctions or bids; etc.

THE ADVERTISING PLANNING PROCESS. It includes 7 steps: 1 analyzing the current situation (like the product features, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, ie SWOT analysis, competitors and industry analysis); 2 defining the target audience (consumer behaviour analysis); 3 developing advertising goals and plans based on the marketing goals and plans; 4 calculating the advertising budget; 5 & 6 developing and executing creative strategy and media strategy (about producing an ad and placing it appropriately in a media channel(s)); and 7 evaluating advertising effectiveness (that whether or not, it has served its goals).

THE SELLING STYLES AND ADVERTISING APPEALS

Hard-sale style persuades the audience to buy now, for instance, buy now and get a discount because many viewers soon target the ads to buy the product or avoid buying. The soft-sale style persuades and motivates the audience to build desire for a product. The rationale or logical appeals influence the audiences through logical reasoning about the product features and price, etc, for which our left brain hemisphere works. The emotional appeals influence the audience through heart by showing beautiful models or backgrounds in the ad, for which our right brain hemisphere works. A combination of both appeals can also be exploited.

THE MOST IMPORTANT PARTS OF ADVERTISING: COPY, ART, & PRODUCTION
Copy includes every word written in an ad, or shown, spoken, and sung on a TV ad, or radio ad. The art deals with visual images of an ad including illustrations, graphics, pictures, painting, photos, cartoons, caricatures, drawings etc. It’s important to note that in radio advertising, the art director deals with the dialogue delivery for beauty and perfection. In electronic advertising, the art director assists the direct in selecting sets or locations, cast, costumes and get up. Production deals with production of an ad in the print media (such as, in newspapers, magazines, flyers, catalogues, etc) or on the electronic media (such as, TV and radio).

MEDIA PLANNING
“Media planning is the process of distributing the advertising message to the target audience at the appropriate time and place through appropriate channel.” Media planning helps answer such question as: What audience do we want to reach? When and where to reach them? How many people to reach? How often to reach them and at what cost?

A media plan outlines specific media objectives, strategy and tactics to be used in advertising a particular product or brand. A media vehicle is an individual medium / media unit or media channel in print or electronic media, for example, BBC, Dawn, Geo, ARY, Ham TV, KTN, FM Radio, Jang, Kawish, etc are all individual media vehicle. A media mix is the combination of two or more media units. A media plan might include a couple of media units. Mass media includes the media that reach at macro level.

MEDIA PLANNING VERSUS MEDIA BUYING

It is important to note that media buying deals only with the process of buying space or time on media with efficacy and efficiency, while the media planning is a complex process of designing the whole media campaign including media buying.

REACHING THE TARGET AUDIENCE AND ITS FREQUENCY. Reach is a measure of how many target audience are exposed to a particular medium or media vehicle at least once in a given period. For example, the reach of Daily Dawn newspaper is 2.5 million people every day and 2 million people a week for weekly Akhbar-e-Jahan. Frequency measures how many times or the number of times people in the target audience are exposed to a media vehicle in a given period. For example, the frequency of working women group is 60 times for Geo TV, 40 times for Star Plus and 20 times for The Music TV in a month. Reach and frequency help media plan determine the most suitable media units for particulars audience.

Media 1, electronic media reach 1 million; frequency 4 times a month
Media 2, print media reach 0.5 million; frequency 2 times a month

Total number of exposures = 1,000,000 ( reach ) x 4 ( frequency ) +
500,00 ( reach ) x 2 ( frequency ) = 5,000,000
Total target audience reach = 1,500,000
Total target audience frequency = 6 times a month
Average frequency (considering all media) = no. of exposures
total reach
= 5,000,000 = 3 times a month
1,500,000
It means that media experts and planers assure that 1.5 millions people will watch Geo TV and read Jang News, for instance, 6 times a month, as an average 3 times a month on the two media vehicles and the total numbers of exposures will be 5 millions, which means the media channels are seen 5 million times in a month. The more a channel is seen or read, the more chances are that the ad will be viewed by the target audience.

Developing Media Strategy
Two of the salient decisions here are: 1, Determine geographic scope. Where the advertisement will be shown at a local district level, provincial level, national level, or international level? 2, Scheduling the message. Decide about the timings to run the ad. A number of techniques are available for scheduling. Refer the book of Advertising Excellence by Courtland Bovie.

IMPLEMENTING MEDIA PLAN
The advertising agencies design a chart to highlight media timings at different days of a week, in various months in a year. Refer page 365 on the book of Advertising Excellence by Courtland Bovie. Finally, the media planner and media buyers tally the actual timing and quality of and ad with the planned ad timings and quality. If the ad does not appear at appropriate times, as directed by the media planners, or the quality output isn’t delivered, the media buyers ask the media to make a discount or repeat the advertisement to offset the loss.

ADVERTISING VERSUS PUBLICITY: Many people think that they are the same but it’s not true. Refer the advertising definition above. Publicity includes various tools such as public speeches by the company executives, press releases, press conferences, letters to editors, articles in the newspapers and magazines, publishing booklets, annual reports and so forth in order to publicize the company and its products.