3 Key Principles for Success in Advertising

Advertising is a very popular marketing channel because of the speed at which it can reach new audiences, as well as the data it generates. However, it can also be very expensive and wasteful if not used wisely. The following three principles set the foundations for advertising success in any channel and for any opportunity.

The most important principle has nothing to do with the creativity that advertising is famous for. However, it is essential for it to happen. We are referring to targeting. In fact, one of the most powerful aspects of advertising over other popular channels such as SEO or content, is that a business can reach almost everyone at any time provided they pick the right placements.

The basic premise is that it refers to the ‘who’ to target and not ‘where’ to target them – That’s covered in Principle 2 – or ‘what’ to target them with, which is covered in Principle 3. Establishing this is not easy, however. It frequently leads to small marketing teams and entrepreneurs falling into a trap of overly-simplifying the process.

The best way to see this is with an example. A team at a small fashion startup may create a website and decide to advertise on social media. So far so good – a tried and tested approach. However, they may over-simplify the target market by making broad assumptions, such as targeting young people in a certain area. These assumptions may be correct at a broad level. However, they lack specificity, which can lead to poor budget allocation and major overspends. By contrast, were the team to be more specific such as men or women, aged 18-21, in halls or near university campuses, with interests in key online influencers, they would require precise data to make these judgements.

This is where major brands excel because their targeting capabilities are considerably more advanced. They are able to bring together economic data, existing customer data, competitor insights and broader industry information to assess the addressable market for each product.

Returning to the example of the fashion startup, simple targeting may suffice in the short-term to get up and running, or even longer term if the business wants to remain small. However, by nature, most businesses need to constantly evolve and grow to achieve continued success.

We have no choice but to see adverts across almost every aspect of our lives. This can be beneficial, as it may save us extensive time sifting through hundreds of competitive products. However, it can also be frustrating, with ads being served at times when we don’t want to see them. This makes it critical to consider the following.

a) Engagement

A business doesn’t have to be selling good vibes to elicit a positive reaction, although of course it helps. Instead, generating a positive reaction has more to do with selecting a method of engagement that is appropriate to the target audience. For example, a campaign aimed at older generations may be more appropriate for the national press. By contrast, a campaign aimed at young people is likely to be more suited to online channels.

That may sound very straightforward, but here’s a twist that’s so easy to fall into. In reality, stereotypes across generations, as with any other, are very loose. There are actually lots of older people that use most social media channels and young people that read national publications. Yet, this may not mean that a marketer should simply default to these channels as they ‘can’ use them to target these audiences. Instead, the motivations of all audiences really need to be considered across all channels before acting on stereotypes or defaulting to ‘easy targeting’ options.

There are many marketing campaigns that you will see that break this rule, and of course, they can be very successful. However, a word of caution as these campaigns can also feel inauthentic, frustrate people, and damage a brand.

b) Costs

Advertising is an expensive pursuit. Don’t be fooled by the dream that a positive Cost-per-acquisition can be achieved by creating a website without wider recognition. Otherwise, the world’s leading brand would focus all their budgets at the bottom of the funnel. That simply isn’t the case. In many cases, money is frequently focused at the top of the funnel, for example using TV, Radio and Billboard campaigns to then facilitate social media conversion.

For this reason, there are a complex set of assessments that need to be performed before considering a channel.

c) Inventory

The monetary costs for an impression vary significantly depending on the platform, and for good reason. Some impressions are lasting and impactful, while others are fleeting and wasteful.

This assessment is made more challenging by variances in costs within the same platform, for example, higher prices for better placements. The complexities here are impossible to explain without a challenge in mind, suffice to say that marketers would be wise to avoid default positions based on their own values.

To provide a simple metaphor, if you go to a theatre, the cheapest seats often have limited visibility. Whereas, for just a tiny relative cost more, the next level won’t. If you apply that thought to the quality of advertising impressions, it may help you to better evaluate the options.

d) Scalability

The major benefit and draw of online advertising isn’t just the data that it provides. In fact, the flexibility and scalability of online advertising is what gets so many marketers and finances officers hooked.

The premise is very simple. Marketers obviously want to invest more if the campaigns are successful, and pull back if the opposite happens. Furthermore, if the brand or business strategy changes, such as expanding into new markets, a marketing team will want to quickly adapt. This is another reason that social media platforms have exploded, funded by advertising business models.

Yet, social platforms rarely provide the mass exposure that brands can require, which makes TV a more scalable option for many. Especially with new targeting options, TV can work similarly to social media and have a much more pronounced impact over a shorter period.

e) Skills

The skills required for each advertising channel vary significantly. In simple terms, this means that marketers at the coal face of digital advertising will rarely run a TV campaign or furthermore a radio or billboard campaign. This can be viewed in the structure of marketing agencies to suit these specialisms.

The skills required for each channel also vary in technicality. Broadly speaking, online campaigns are more product based, and therefore more technical yet less creative than offline campaigns. This shapes the skills required with a greater focus on technical acumen than ‘big ideas’.

These assessments subsequently feed into the time it may take to run campaigns and/or hire the people required to do so.

f) Data

Data is crucial to assessing the performance of all marketing channels. However, working out how to generate the best data is far from easy. Furthermore, the challenge of assessing its value can be made more difficult by the opaque nature of some service providers.

For example, a social platform may suggest that it can instantly target fitness enthusiasts, which may be perfect if you're selling fitness equipment. However, if you’re going to spend millions of pounds, you’ll want to dig a little deeper into their methodology for making this judgement. Does the fact that a person has liked a fitness post truly reveal them to be a fitness enthusiast?!

Making these judgements reveals the insight and true value of the data. Data alone has no value. In fact, it can be misleading, confusing and time-wasting. Instead, it is the ability for skilled people to clean it up and reveal the insights within it that makes it valuable.

In a marketing arena filled with increasing technicality, it’s easy to forget the importance of creativity. In fact, its value has never changed, but what has is the ease at which high-quality well-designed activations can be created.

To assess the need for creativity for a particular channel, a marketer must begin by evaluating the nature of the engagements as we’ve covered in Principle 2. For example, online advertising campaigns are broadly similar, relatively easy to generate with online design tools, and have a fleeting impact on a target audience.

By contrast, TV advertising campaigns are much more impactful, distinctive and emotive due to the length of the exposure. This provides a much greater requirement for storytelling. This is why major mass-market above-the-line campaigns are regularly used to create an emotional imprint before being topped up in digital channels afterwards. As we shown in our analyses of Nike and Apple’s brands, prime TV slots such as the Super Bowl often generate the most impact.

Moving beyond the commoditised templates available using digital platforms, designers and producers are essential for providing a uniquely distinct emotional impact. However, to operate effectively they need the insight packaged for them, which is the preserve of planners at advertising agencies and rarely found as a specialist role in-house.

We can therefore finish this principle by considering a hugely important aspect of creativity, namely its subjective nature. There is simply no way to precisely know how a campaign will be received before it is launched. Of course, these aspects can be controlled for by using focus groups, and running A/B tests, but they are best guesses. As we’ve previously researched, campaigns that win awards usually break with convention, making them memorable.

Mastering the discipline

We explained three principles that can be used to manage advertising campaigns in any channel. However, to develop them requires specialist skills that simply couldn’t be explained in any blog.

Instead, what we hope you can take away is that advertising campaigns requires time away from ‘the doing’. Instead, a separate planning and development phase is always required prior to activation to avoid wasteful ‘on the job’ decisions.

We hope you enjoyed reading. You may like to discover more principles for marketing success. Alternatively, if you have any further questions, please do get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.