Expert: Leo Lingham - 9/23/2008

Question
Hi Leo,
Please expalin variuos alternatives available to a creative director for creative associations of a brand?.
and what are the role and functions of a full service advertising agency.vis-a-vis an advertising agency which is only booking classified advertisements.

Also,Celebrity advertising is obviously expensive however frequently used so what are its major advantages of celebrity advertising

Answer
MANASI,
HERE  IS SOME  USEFUL  MATERIAL.
REGARDS
LEO LINGHAM
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1.Please explain variuos alternatives available to a creative director for creative associations of a brand?.

What is a Brand?
Brands can be defined in two ways.
Firstly, a brand can be an identification, or a mark, that differentiates one business from another (through a name or a logo, for example).
Secondly, a brand symbolises how people think about your business.
Building a brand helps customers in their decision-making, creating a perceived knowledge of what they are going to buy – before they buy it.
Brands are based on three related criteria:
Brands can be defined in two ways. Firstly, a brand can be an identification, or a mark, that differentiates one business from another (through a name or a logo, for example). Secondly, a brand symbolises how people think about your business.
Building a brand helps customers in their decision-making, creating a perceived knowledge of what they are going to buy – before they buy it.
Brands are based on three related criteria:
Confidence in a business, product or service doing exactly what the customer already believes it will do. For example, a 24-hour convenience store brand can be based on customers’ confidence that it will be open, whatever the time of day or night
The emotional response of the customer to purchasing a product or service. For example, a clothing retailer can create a brand based around making its customers feel good about what they wear, how they look, how good they feel about buying clothes from that shop and what it says about them to their peers.
A brand builds a unique personality for a business, and therefore attracts a defined type of customer. Most importantly, branding is based on consistently rewarding the confidence and delivering the expected emotional response. For example, a domestic cleaning company can build its brand successfully if customers’ homes are always thoroughly cleaned, the owners believe that they are using the best cleaning company and feel good about returning to their newly cleaned homes

FIRST,  DEVELOPS   A   BRAND  IDENTITY  USING
-symbol
-logo
-fonts
-color
-sound
PLUS
BRAND  PRODUCTS
-features
-benefits
-quality
-certainty
-reliability
-delivery
-packaging
-design

USES   THESE   ELEMENTS  TO  BUILD   A  PLATFORM
CREATING
-vision
-mission
-values
-personality
-positioning
TO  CREATE   A  BRAND   EQUITY
Brand Equity The sum of all distinguishing qualities of a brand, drawn from all relevant stakeholders, that results in personal commitment to and demand for the brand; these differentiating thoughts and feelings make the brand valued and valuable.
BRAND  EQUITY   REFLECTS  HOW  THEY  THINK   ABOUT  THE  BRAND.

The Seven Components of Brand Equity
Brand Permeation: a weighted combination of brand and advertising awareness and
availability (i.e., distribution).
Brand Distinctiveness: a weighted combination of measures that indicate brand
differentiation, uniqueness, and superiority.
Brand Quality: An overall assessment of the brand as a whole and its line extensions in
terms of its overall reputation for quality of product or service.
Brand Value: A weighted combination of measures that reflect the extent to which the
brand delivers what buyers pay for—often known as “price-value.”
Brand Personality: The extent to which the brand’s image is congruent with who the
buyer is or wants to be.
Brand Potential: The extent to which consumers will pay more for, go out of their way
for, or are willing to try this brand’s new products, services, or line extensions.
Competitive Inoculation: The extent to which the consumer would stick with the brand
in times of adversity or competitiveness.
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Creating the Brand
Once your have worked out your core competencies, brand values, perceived quality and brand stretch, you can communicate them to your customers.
Build the message into everything your customer or potential customer sees and hears before they have any direct contact with your business. Make sure your company literature reflects your brand values. If necessary, redesign your logo and company stationery so it provides an immediate visual link to your brand values.

For example, if speed is a brand value, add an indication of movement into your company’s designs. Reconsider any advertising you may do. Is it in places that reflect your brand values? Does the copy reflect your brand values

Make sure your staff understand the brand values and believe in them. Your staff's attitude and behaviour will influence the success of your brand more than any promotional activity. Remember that if you make strong customer service a brand value, the brand is damaged if one customer feels that whoever they are talking to doesn’t care about service

Review your systems and make sure every point of contact that a customer or potential customer has reflects your brand values. For example, if being friendly is one of your brand values, make sure anyone who answers the telephone or has direct contact with customers is friendly
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2.what are the role and functions of a full service advertising agency.vis-a-vis an advertising agency which is only booking classified advertisements.



Advertising Agency Functions
Professionals at advertising agencies and other advertising organizations offer a number of functions including:
Account Management – Within an advertising agency the account manager or account executive is tasked with handling all major decisions related to a specific client. These responsibilities include locating and negotiating to acquire clients. Once the client has agreed to work with the agency, the account manager works closely with the client to develop an advertising strategy. For very large clients, such as large consumer products companies, an advertising agency may assign an account manager to work full-time with only one client and, possibly, with only one of the client’s product lines. For smaller accounts an account manager may simultaneously manage several different, though non-competing, accounts.

Account Service
The other major department in ad agencies is account services or account management. Account Services or account management is somewhat the sales arm of the advertising agency. An account executive (one who works within the account services department) meets with the client to determine sales goals and creative strategy. They are then responsible for coordinating the creative, media, and production staff behind the campaign. Throughout the creative process, they keep in touch with the client to update them on the ad's progress and gain feedback. Upon completion of the creative work, it is their job to ensure the ad's production and placement.
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Creative Team –The principle role of account managers is to manage the overall advertising campaign for a client, which often includes delegating selective tasks to specialists. For large accounts one task account managers routinely delegate involves generating ideas, designing concepts and creating the final advertisement, which generally becomes the responsibility of the agency’s creative team. An agency’s creative team consists of specialists in
**GRAPHIC DESIGN SECTION
**COPY WRITING SECTION
**FILM PRODUCTION
**AUDIO PRODUCTION
**COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
Creative department
The people who create the actual ads form the core of an advertising agency. Modern advertising agencies usually form their copywriters and art directors into creative teams. Creative teams may be permanent partnerships or formed on a project-by-project basis. The art director and copywriter report to a creative director, usually a creative employee with several years of experience. Although copywriters have the word "write" in their job title, and art directors have the word "art", one does not necessarily write the words and the other draw the pictures; they both generate creative ideas to represent the proposition (the advertisement or campaign's key message). Creative departments frequently work with outside design or production studios to develop and implement their ideas. Creative departments may employ production artists as entry-level positions, as well as for operations and maintenance.
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Researchers – Full-service advertising agencies employ market researchers who assess a client’s market situation, including understanding customers and competitors, and also are used to test creative ideas. For instance, in the early stages of an advertising campaign researchers may run focus group sessions with selected members of the client’s target market in order to get their reaction to several advertising concepts. Researchers are also used following the completion of an advertising campaign to measure whether the campaign reached its objectives.
**CONSUMER RESEARCH
**RETAIL AUDIT
**MARKET SURVEYS
**MARKET POTENTIAL STUDY
ETC ETC.
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Media Planners – Once an advertisement is created, it must be placed through an appropriate advertising media. Each advertising media, of which there are thousands, has its own unique methods for accepting advertisements, such as different advertising cost structures (i.e., what it costs marketers to place an ad), different requirements for accepting ad designs (e.g., size of ad), different ways placements can be purchased (e.g., direct contact with media or through third-party seller), and different time schedules (i.e., when ad will be run). Understanding the nuances of different media is the role of a media planner, who looks for the best media match for a client and also negotiates the best deals.
**MEDIA SURVEY
*TARGET AUDIENCE STUDY
**MEDIA PLANNING
*MEDIA BUYING
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TRAFFIC DEPARTMENT
The traffic department regulates the flow of work in the agency. It is typically headed by a traffic manager (or system administrator). Traffic increases an agency's efficiency and profitability through the reduction of false job starts, inappropriate job initiation, incomplete information sharing, over- and under-cost estimation, and the need for media extensions. In small agencies without a dedicated traffic manager, one employee may be responsible for managing workflow, gathering cost estimates and answering the phone, for example. Large agencies may have a traffic department of ten or more employees
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OTHER SERVICES OFFERED BY AD. AGENCIES.

# SALES PROMOTIONS
-agency also provides help to the clients in SALES PROMOTION ACTIVITIES.
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# RETAIL CONSUMER PROMOTIONS
-agency also provides help to the clients in RETAIL CONSUMER PROMOTION ACTIVITIES.
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# BELOW THE LINE ADVERTISING
-agency also provides help to the clients in BELOW THE LINE ADVERTISING,
like merchandising/ displays/ etc etc.
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# DIRECT MARKETING
-agency also provides help to the clients in DIRECT MARKETING ACTIVITIES.
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# ONLINE MARKETING
-agency also provides help to the clients in ONLINE MARKETING ACTIVITIES.
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#PUBLIC RELATIONS
-agency also provides help to the clients in PUBLIC RELATIONS ACTIVITIES.
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Creative Services 'Production' department
The creative services department may not be so well known, but its employees are the people who have contacts with the suppliers of various creative media. For example, they will be able to advise upon and negotiate with printers if an agency is producing flyers for a client. However, when dealing with the major media (broadcast media, outdoor, and the press), this work is usually outsourced to a media agency which can advise on media planning and is normally large enough to negotiate prices down further than a single agency or client can.
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3.Also,Celebrity advertising is obviously expensive however frequently used so what are its major advantages of celebrity advertising

1. Research has indicated that customers are more likely to choose goods and services endorsed by celebrities than those without such endorsements .
2.Another advantage to celebrity-based campaigns is that famous people hold the viewer's
attention.
3.The third benefit of using celebrity endorsers is that s/he can provide testimony for a product or service, particularly when the product has contributed to their celebrity.
4.Attractiveness of the celebrity: This principle states that an attractive endorser will have a positive impact on the endorsement. The endorser should be attractive to the target audience in certain aspects like physical appearance, intellectual capabilities, athletic competence, and lifestyle. It has been proved that an endorser that appears attractive as defined above has a grater chance of enhancing the memory of the brand that he/she endorses.
5.Credibility of the celebrity: This principle states that for any brand-celebrity collaboration to be successful, the personal credibility of the celebrity is crucial. Credibility is defined here as the celebrities’ perceived expertise and trustworthiness. As celebrity endorsements act as an external cue that enable consumers to sift through the tremendous brand clutter in the market, the credibility factor of the celebrity greatly influences the acceptance with consumers.
6.Meaning transfer between the celebrity and the brand: This principle states that the success of the brand-celebrity collaboration heavily depends on the compatibility between the brand and the celebrity in terms of identity, personality, positioning in the market vis-à-vis competitors, and lifestyle. When a brand signs on a celebrity, these are some of the compatibility factors that have to exist for the brand to leverage the maximum from that collaboration.
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some of the important aspects of celebrity branding as discussed below:
Consistency and long-term commitment: As with branding, companies should try to maintain consistency between the endorser and the brand to establish a strong personality and identity. More importantly, companies should view celebrity endorsements as long-term strategic decisions affecting the brand.
Three prerequisites to selecting celebrities: Before signing on celebrities to endorse their brands, companies need to ensure that they meet three basic prerequisites, namely the endorser should be attractive, have a positive image in the society, and be perceived as having the necessary knowledge (although it might be difficult for a celebrity to meet all three prerequisites)
Celebrity–brand match: Consistent with the principles discussed earlier, companies should ensure a match between the brand being endorsed and the endorser so that the endorsements are able to strongly influence the thought processes of consumers and create a positive perception of the brand.
Constant monitoring: Companies should monitor the behavior, conduct and public image of the endorser continuously to minimize any potential negative publicity. One of the most effective ways to do this is to ensure that celebrity endorsement contracts are effectively drafted, keeping in mind any such negative events.
Selecting unique endorsers: Companies should try to bring on board those celebrities who do not endorse competitors’ products or other quite different products, so that there is a clear transfer of personality and identity between the endorser and the brand.
Timing: As celebrities command a high price tag, companies should be on the constant lookout for emerging celebrities who show some promise and potential and sign them on in their formative years if possible to ensure a win–win situation.
Brand over endorser: When celebrities are used to endorse brands, one obvious result could be the potential overshadowing of the brand by the celebrity. Companies should ensure that this does not happen by formulating advertising collaterals and other communications.
Celebrity endorsement is just a channel: Companies must realize that having a celebrity endorsing a brand is not a goal in itself; rather it is one part of the communication mix that falls under the broader category of sponsorship marketing.
Celebrity ROI: Even though it is challenging to measure the effects of celebrity endorsements on companies’ brands, companies should have a system combining quantitative and qualitative measures to measure the overall effect of celebrity endorsements on their brands.
Trademark and legal contracts: Companies should ensure that the celebrities they hire are on proper legal terms so that they don’t endorse competitors’ products in the same product category, thereby creating confusion in the minds of the consumers.
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