How clients can improve their advertising by improving their decision-making

Abstract

Manufacturers and service organizations have to make marketing decisions of two types in managing their advertising: financial ones and creative ones. Financial decisions — those regarding advertising budgets — are made at a high level in corporate hierarchies, and by the most experienced executives. This is because expenditures are often large. Creative decisions — those concerning actual content of campaigns — are made at a much lower level and are often rubber-stamped by executives at the top. From any perspective, this is a deeply flawed system, as we shall see, because the financial and creative decisions are intimately related. Without effective campaigns, financial investments are wasted. In addition, a substantive proportion of campaigns are in fact either weak or totally ineffective, as measured by reliable data. In relation to a critical 21st-century perspective on marketing, this chapter considers several crucial questions pertaining to a major component of marketing, and one in which substantial resource allocations are made.

I am grateful to Simon Broadbent, formerly of Leo Burnett, and Jeremy Bullmore of WPP, for valuable comments on earlier versions of this chapter, which itself is an expanded version of an article ‘Advertising: The Cinderella of Business’, Market Leader, 9 (2000), published by the World Advertising Research Center and used here with permission.