Advertising: Mastering the Art of Promotion

In This Mastering the Art of Promotion

• Being aware of the advertising around you (as if you could avoid it)
• Putting the fundamentals of good advertising to work for you 
• Taking a few lessons from the pros

Advertising is a $300 billion industry in the United States alone. Plunkett Research, Ltd. (the company that provided this figure) points out that the large numbers don’t stop there. In the United States, advertisers flood the following mediums in droves:

• 1,749 broadcast TV stations (and that’s not including cable and satelliteTV outlets)
• 13,599 radio stations
• 2,250 daily and Sunday newspapers

And those figures don’t even take into consideration the thousands of magazines, direct mail, Web sites, blogs, outdoor advertising (billboards, bus shelters, and so on), or specialty or alternative advertising, which includes everything from airplane banners at the beach to tchotchkes, small items like tote bags, pens, and t-shirts that merchants and businesses give away to remind consumers to do business with them.

With all these choices of how to get your message out there, how do you decide what’s the best medium to reach the customers you’re looking for? And how can you develop an ad campaign that won’t get lost in the morass? You don’t have to hire an ad agency (though you can: Deciding Whether to Hire an Ad Agency offers guidance on how best to do this, and Ten Ways to Know It’s Time to Hire an Agency gives you ten ways to know whether you need outside help). But you can also do it yourself, and this book tells how.

You don’t have to hire an ad agency. But you can also do it yourself, and this blog tells how.

In this part, I fill you in on the basics of advertising — what’s effective and what isn’t. Then I give you a short course on all your advertising options —radio, TV (network and cable), magazines and newspapers, direct mail, outdoor, the Web, and more — and I show how you can put them to work for you. Finally, I end with stories about two legends of advertising as well as brief introductions of more recent ad giants, because if you focus on the best and figure out what they’ve done well, you can try to incorporate some of their genius into your own advertising — and come out ahead of the competition.