Sometime last year, I started contributing an article for a magazine, The Observer of Management Education. The below article was published in the September 2008 issue.
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Picture this. A kid wakes up early morning from his bed and gets out of his home. At the same time, his pet dog also wakes and starts following him. During the day, the kid is seen playing football, playing near a stream, and generally having a good time. And throughout this time, the faithful pet dog continues to be at his side, and follows him wherever he wanders. At night, the kid goes back to his home, and is seen sleeping peacefully on his bed. Guess what, the dog is still next to him, sleeping. A nice song plays in the background. At the end, we see the words – wherever you go, our network follows.
Chances are that you would want to watch this film again and again, and that you also talked about this film to your friends. Chances also are that you remember the name of the company1. Maybe you even went out to the shop and bought the services of this company.
The company is, of course, Hutch. And we are talking about its now famous pug advertising campaign. Isn’t it a little weird that this company chose to show a cute boy and an equally adorable pug in its ads, instead of talking about what services it offers, or what is the price range, or where it is available in the market?
It is not, when we understand what advertising is and how it works.
What is advertising?
Put in simple terms, advertising is how a company talks to consumers at large, about its products and services that it offers. Because it talks to a huge number of people together, it has to do this through a mediator like a TV channel, or a magazine, and it pays the mediator for that service.
If we were to define in a more evolved manner aka management, advertising would be defined as a paid form of mass, non-personal communication. This definition also helps separate advertising as a form of communication different from unpaid publicity (Public Relations), Direct marketing, and Sales Promotion.
In a normal 2-year full-time management course, advertising as a practice of marketing is covered as a short topic in the second semester, and as a separate subject in the third semester for students specialising in marketing.
How do other communication tools stand against advertising?
As mentioned earlier, Public Relations is a form of communication using unpaid publicity. Direct Marketing involves one-on-one personal communication with the consumers, and Sales Promotion is mainly to do with schemes and discounts with the sole objective of increasing sales.
However, over the years, all forms of communication have started overlapping with each other so much, that now, during decision making, companies club all these forms and refer to them as Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC).
The role of advertising
Since advertising is how the company talks to its customers, the company depends on it to pass on any meaningful information about the company’s products, services, offers, policies and practices to them. Thus, if it does a good job, customers get the message and use this information to decide whether they want to buy the company’s products or not.
However, with technology increasingly becoming available to everyone, and products becoming less and less unique, companies look up to communications (and thus advertising too) to play a more critical role for their businesses. Since advertising is by far the biggest medium of interaction between the company and everybody else, from that point of view, the company’s advertising also becomes the face of the company. This, then, requires a lot more rigour in the way it is practiced.
If we look at the way different telecom companies advertise, we can make our own judgments about not just their services, but also their point of view on the business itself. Hutch (now Vodafone) depicts the simplicity of using its services by showing a pug helping its master find socks, stick stamps, etc. Idea, on the other hand, shows how mobile phones come in handy in different situations, like communicating with deaf people, and even teaching children in far away villages. Airtel, with its ‘Express Yourself’ series of TV ads, just encourages people to speak up and talk to each other. All these companies make an attempt in their own way connect with their customers emotionally. At the same time, they do make sure they stay within the boundaries of their businesses so that it doesn’t sound superficial or fake.
Different media used in advertising
As we discussed earlier, at the end of the day, ads still play (or are expected to play) a critical role in generating sales. Hence, ads follow consumers wherever they are, and tell them about the companies’ products and services. Thus, there is advertising on TV, in magazines, on hoardings at the side of roads, on the back of bus tickets, on the radio, and thanks to Google, even next to our messages in our email inbox.
These various media are referred to as:
1)Television
2)Print or Press, which includes newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.
3)Radio
4)Out of home, which includes hoardings on the road, bus stops, railway platforms, TV screens in multiplexes, etc.
5)Digital, which refers to the Internet
Based on how we evolve in our use of media, these categories continue to branch out from the root. With the increase in mobile phones penetration, that medium might become a separate branch in itself, requiring special attention.
The world of advertising inside out
The ads that we see on TV or in a magazine, and the melodious, or sometimes jarring jingles that we hear on radio are a result of a lot of work that goes behind the screens. A variety of people with different skills and ideas come together to create a work of art called an ad, that’s also supposed to sell. Just like the practice of management, this one too is always involved in a debate of science versus art. Because of this, advertising as a profession attracts both the most creative and the most scientific of brains.
In a typical ad agency, work is divided into several departments. There is Account Management, which acts as a liaison between the agency and the client. They act as the client’s representative within the agency, bringing all business knowledge to the table. Then there is Account Planning, which acts as the customer’s representative, studying the target audience’s behaviour, habits, culture, customs and traditions, attitudes, etc.
When any work for creating an ad starts, the Account Management and Account Planning teams use their knowledge bank to put a communication strategy in place. This is then fed to another department, the Creative team. As their name suggests, these are the people who take a leap from the obvious, into the unknown, and come back with ideas that would create magic on the small screens of TV and computers or in the newspaper. The ideas are then used by the Production department to create ads for various media like TV and print and radio.
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