Advertising is one of the marketing mix elements that is critically important to support and sustain the growth of a brand. It is a means of communication which helps the brand to establish connections and build strong, long-term relationships with consumers and customers over time. Advertising empowers the marketer to inform and influence people about the brand by establishing brand identity, personality, credibility and loyalty with the consumers and prospects, intellectually and emotionally.
A quite common thought among marketers is that while advertising is expected to have a specific role with regard to brand building, is the specific advertisement delivering as much on the intended objective? Of course advertising costs money and any budget is finite, hence it is imperative for the marketer to understand whether the advertising is working or not, whether he or she is getting bang for the buck that has been invested in the advertisement. Therefore it is important to measure advertising effectiveness which imparts flexibility to the marketer to do mid-term course correction, should there be some specific areas of improvement identified through researching the efficacy of the advertisement.
There is no one formula to measure advertising effectiveness. Often there is a tendency to plunge into inference by looking at the ad’s performance through one lens. But to start with, there must be a clearly defined advertising objective, without which measurement and drawing of conclusions become fuzzy. For example there could be two different ads for the same brand running at the same time, but in two different media vehicles. A marketer could plan for a radio (FM) ad intended to drive brand salience, running concurrently with a TV ad aimed at creating conviction of brand values. In this instance the yardstick of measurement of the radio ad will be quite different from the TV ad to determine effectiveness. Similarly, YouTube could feature an ad whose objective could be to create positive disposition towards the brand, while an ad in Facebook could communicate to users to directly place an order for the advertised brand. The objective of an outdoor ad could be to reinforce brand awareness, whereas a print ad could aim at increasing the quality awareness of the brand, where the consumer gets to know just enough about the brand to have an informed opinion about it. Hence it is prudent to appreciate that different media vehicles, with varying advertising costs, may have different roles in promoting a brand, which can be leveraged optimally i.e. in a value efficient manner, to create a synergistic impact, thereby contributing to the overall marketing goal.
Hence it may be worthwhile to dimensionalise the different types of advertising objectives by converting them into simple questions as follows:
There could be other such questions too and depending upon the objective the right questions need to be asked in fairly determining advertising effectiveness. Advertising may have evolved over the years and so has the media consumption behaviour of consumers, but regardless any marketer would always be keen that his ad is effective in whichever media vehicle it features to be able to meaningfully contribute to the brand’s success.
