Marketing services
Advertising

The favorite "whipping boy" of forward-thinking marketers, advertising has received a bad rap in this age of the Tivo and YouTube.

Although our crystal ball is admittedly fuzzy, we don't think advertising, even the 30- or 60-second TV commercial, will disappear anytime soon.

Why? Because advertising, done right for the right kind of company in the right situation, can be an extremely effective way to generate rapid awareness or establish a new positioning, which can then feed into the progressive process of advancing prospects toward becoming paying customers. And all of that requires the recognition that adertising can be part of an integrated mix of marketing tools.

Unfortunately, advertising is seldom viewed in that light. But we do, because we take a neutral view to marketing tools to employ when beginning a relationship with a client, and then only recommend the tools we uncover as being appropriate to advance that client.

And while much of the hoopla about advertising centers on TV ads, we have also created and placed other types of ads that have generated strong response. Radio. Newspaper. Magazine. Online banner and search engine ads.

But only if it is right for you, the client.

A shameless self-promotion

In addition to positioning a healthcare company as offering a unique approach to its primary practice area via a public relations campaign consisting of encouraging patients to communicate their stories to targeted media, we recognized that the repetitive mentioning of the positioning via advertising would complement and reinforce the advances made by the PR activities.

While the initial print advertisement in targeted publications stressed benefits to be gained from the company's practice, it was so copy-heavy that it failed to appeal to the time-pressed audience. The result? Inquiries traced to the ad were fewer than desired. Consequently, we revised the ad to visually convey benefits with minimum copy. The subsequent ad generated four-times the number of inquiries as the initial ad.