Both had the same goal: change their respective brand’s engrained perceptions. Radio Shack had been wearing a pocket protector long before Best Buy took its lunch money, broke its soldering gun, and stuffed it in a locker. Jaguar had been showing people it’s yearbooks from the 1960’s, while yelling at Audi to get off its lawn.
This coming Sunday, corporations will be spending roughly $4 million for each 30 seconds of advertising they obtain. Even at these rates, available commercial slots for 2014’s big football game sold out in 2013. It’s the most watched TV show in North America every year with an expected audience of 108,000,000 consumers.
Whether the bidding is done with a raised hand or a clicked mouse is just a matter of auction location. Nobody asks me, “How do you advertise an off-site auction?” They don’t ask that, because they advertise off-site auctions like the way they advertise on-site auctions. Online auctions are just off-site auctions held in a virtual venue.
Business owners often understand the golden rule when it comes to customer service. It’s interesting to me, though, how often we overlook that guiding principle in marketing and don’t design advertising that we’d want to read, if the roles were reversed. Give advertising unto others that you’d want given unto you; and see what happens to your company brochure—and your bottom line.
Empathy is huge for trust. That means letting people know that we realize that this is their treasured collection, lifetime achievement, or financial security that’s at stake. Each situation will determine what is professionally appropriate to say; and this doesn’t have to be a verbose section of a proposal, but intentionally moving into this perspective for even one sentence can be enough to separate ourselves from the competition.
All media is adapting to technological advancements and changing audience habits, but the newspaper industry seems to have the toughest road to relevance. An observant eye will help us as advertisers take advantage of the deals and restrictions that stem from this newspaper landscape to best serve our customers.
I don’t know if it’s appropriate to compare what my clients and I do for a living to a deadly, expensive natural disaster. That said, if the advertising we generate could engulf our buying community like Derecho 2012 has my physical community, we’d all have the job security of an American Electric Power lineman.