Introduction to Advertising
Advertising Campaigns
The best advertising campaigns start with a keen understanding of the customer, but that's not all it takes to create great advertising campaigns. You need a consistent theme.
Stop! If you are about to start an advertising campaign but haven't thought it through, take a moment and avoid wasting your advertising dollars.
The key to a great advertising campaign is to maintain a single theme through all of your advertising.
In this article, we discuss advertising themes and how they make for more effective advertising campaigns.
The Advertising Campaign
You are ready for action when armed with knowledge of your industry, market and audience; a media plan and schedule; your product or service's most important benefits; and measurable goals in terms of sales volume, revenue generated, or other criteria.
The first step is to establish the theme that identifies your product or service in all of your advertising.
The theme of your advertising reflects your special identity or personality, and the particular benefits of your product or service.
For example, cosmetics ads almost always rely on a glamorous theme. Many food products opt for healthy, all-American family campaigns. Automobile advertising frequently concentrates on how the car makes you feel about owning or driving it rather than performance attributes.
Tag lines reinforce the single most important reason for buying your product or service.
For example, "Nothing Runs Like a Deere" (John Deere farm vehicles) conveys performance and endurance with a nice twist on the word "deer."
"Ideas at Work" (Black & Decker tools and appliances) again signifies performance, but also reliability and imagination.
"How the Smart Money Gets that Way" (Barron's financial publication) clearly connotes prosperity, intelligence, and success.
By defining a theme for your advertising and an effective tagline, you'll find that awareness and recall for your advertising campaign increase considerably. That, in turn, will drive results that will improve your bottomline.
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