Fundamentals of Advertising

388 Pages·1999·7.65 MB·English

by  John Wilmshurst

The Fundamentals of Advertising
-
The Voice of British Advertisers
Published in association with the ISBA.
The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) represents €6.5
billion of marketing communications spend and is the single body, within
the UK, to represent advertisers' interests across all marketing communi-
cations disciplines. Founded almost 100 years ago, ISBA'S fundamental
remit is vigorously to promote and protect the interests of British adver-
tisers. By acting as their 'voice', ISBA influences Government, the media,
agencies, consultants, suppliers and other bodies in the marketing com-
munications industry to help create and sustain an environment that max-
imizes the effectiveness of its members' marketing activities.
Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann
Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP
30 Corporate Drive, Burlington, MA 0 1803
First published 1985
Reprinted 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995,1997, 1998
Second edition 1999
Reprinted 2000,2004,2005
Copyright 0 1999, John Wilmshurst and Adrian Mackay. All rights reserved
The rights of to John Wilmshurst and Adrian Mackay be identified as the authors
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including
photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether
or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without
the written permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of
a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road,
London, England WIT 4LP. Applications for the copyright holder’s written
permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed
to the publisher
Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights
Department in Oxford, UK: phone: [phone], fax: [phone],
e-mail: [email protected]. You may also complete your request on-line via
the Elsevier homepage (http://www.elsevier.com), by selecting ‘Customer Support’
and then ‘Obtaining Permissions’
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0 7506 1562 1
For information on all Elsevier Buttenvorth-Heinemann
publications visit our website at www.bh.com
Working together to grow
libraries in developing countries
www.elsevier.com I www.bookaid.org I www.sabre.org
Transferred to digital print 2007
Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne
List of plates
The following can be found in the colour plate section located between
pages 80 and 81:
1 BT. Case History: BT Advertising Campaign - It’s good to talk
2 Andrex. Case History: The Andrex Puppies
3 Audi
4 Boddingtons
5 Levi‘s
6 Olivio
7 French Connection
8 Waterstone’s
9 Cadbury’s Creme Egg
10 Renault Clio
Preface to second
edition
When considering a second edition, an obvious question was, how much
does the book need to be changed? The answer seemed to me to be a split
one. Basic principles, not at all. My view on this was confirmed in an inter-
view (The Times, 24 April 1998) with Chris Powell, ’who heads BMP-DDB,
recently voted Britain’s most successful agency by the industry .. .‘ Asked
whether advertising has changed much during his thirty years at the top,
he replied, ’Actually, I don’t think advertising has changed at all.’ So there
is much in this new edition that is the same - but a lot, too, that is differ-
ent. Facts and figures have been updated wherever possible, but also
massive changes in the way advertising is carried out, as distinct from how
it is planned and created, are reflected. The chapters on the media now
cover all the new developments, such as satellite television and the
Internet. The chapter on printing methods has been totally rewritten in the
light of the computer revolution which has come so far in such a short time.
Also updated considerably are the international chapters, to acknowledge
great developments in the worldwide promotion of global brands. Finally,
new case histories and illustrations demonstrate contemporary ways of
expression.
Acknowledgements are due to all the people who helped with the first
edition, but in addition to Deborah Morrison of ISBA (the Incorporated
Society of British Advertisers), under whose banner the book is now being
published. Also to all the people and companies who helped with illustra-
tions and case histories (listed on page xv).
Particular thanks are due to Mac Mackay, my business associate,
friend and co-author of this edition.
Finally, to Tim Goodfellow of Butterworth-Heinemann, who ‘stayed
with it’ patiently while the ISBA connection and all the other elements
gradually came together.
John Wilmshurst
Acknowledgements
In preparing this book the following organizations have been very helpful;
their courtesy is greatly appreciated:
The Advertising Association
The Advertising Standards Authority (especially for the abridged version
of the Code in Chapter 9)
The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers
The Independent Television Companies Association
For permission to reprint the extracts on pages listed below, the author
would like to thank the following publishers:
p 106 Associated Business Press, Ludgate House, Fleet Street, London
EC4, from The Business ofAdverfising by David Farbey, copyright 0 1979.
p 374 George Allen & Unwin, from International Marketing by S. Majaro,
copyright 0 1977. pp 59, 60, 191, 198 from Advertising by Kenneth A.
Longman, copyright 0 1971 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.,
reprinted by permission of the publisher. p 69 NTC Publications, from
Accountable Advertising by S. Broadbent, copyright 0 1997. pp 71
reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company, from
Ofensive Marketing by J. H. Davidson, originally published by Cassel
and Co. Ltd., copyright 0 J. H. Davidson, 1972. pp 86, 94, 95, 103, 195
McGraw-Hill, from Advertising: What it is and how to do it by R. White,
copyright 0 1980. p 78 McGraw-Hill Fogakasha Ltd, USA, from The
Marketing Communications Process by Wayne M. Delozier, copyright 0
1976. p 188 The Creative Business Ltd, from Creative Advertising by D.
Bernstein, copyright 0 1974.
The authors would in addition like to thank Vance Packard for permission
to reprint the extracts on pages 15 and 24 from his book The Hidden
Persuaders, copyright 0 1957 by Vance Packard.
Thanks are due to the advertising agencies and their clients who kmdly
supplied material for the colour plate section.
Chapter I
This advertising
business
'. . . advertising grew naturally out of the social, economic and com-
mercial developments which took place at an earlier stage in our
history.'
T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain - A history, Heinemann, 1982
By the end of this chapter you will:
Appreciate the long history of advertising and how it became the force
it is today;
Have an overview of how the business is made up;
Understand its size and importance in modern life;
Have a grasp of how it fits into the economic and social scene.
1.1 The space age business from the mists
of time
As this book first took shape in the 1985 first edition, the 'information tech-
nology' revolution was already under way. Cable television was wide-
spread in the USA and about to start trials in the UK. Satellite television
was waiting in the wings. Direct response TV advertising through com-
puter links was being developed. A mere ten years later, all these things
had become commonplace. Now we have a new set of possible ways of
advertising available, from fax to the Internet, and who knows what else.
Advertising is an inescapable part of our lives and very much
involved in the rapidly changing technology of the world we live in.
But advertising in one form or another has been with manlund ever
since trading began. Certainly it was well established in ancient Greece and
some actual examples were recovered from under the volcanic ash that
preserved the ruins of Pompeii.
4 The Fundamentals ofAdvertising
I. I. I The origins of modern advertising
~~~ ~
Advertising as we know it however stems from that earlier time of rapid
change, the Industrial Revolution. Historians argue about the dates when
this began and ended but for our purposes it can be said to have happened
in the UK during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half
of the nineteenth.
During that period a number of things produced the climate in which
advertising could develop:
Population expanded rapidly from 6 million in 1740 to 12 million by
1821. Improvements in agricultural methods meant fewer workers
were required in the countryside at the same time as industrial devel-
opment provided more jobs at better wages in the towns.
This growth and concentration of population was accompanied by
improved transport systems. Better roads, then canals and railways,
made the movement of goods more efficient. This in turn meant that
the processes of distribution and selling became much cheaper.
Thus the ingredients for mass production and eventually mass mar-
keting were coming into being.
Printing had existed since the fifteenth century (the earliest surviving
British advertisement was produced by Caxton about 1477). But
during the eighteenth century, newspapers had developed strongly
from 25 titles with combined circulations of 1,500,000 in 1700 to 258
titles with combined circulations of 16,085,000 in 1800.’
In the early days particularly, the number of readers was prob-
ably much larger than the circulations would suggest. Some copies
were available in coffee houses and reading rooms, where each would
have been read by very many people.
At the beginning of this period, advertising in newspapers
was one insignificant method amongst many more important
ones - including posters, broadsheets and tradesmen’s ’cards’ (sheets
containing not merely their name and address, but listing their wares).
There were even ’advertising engines’ - horse-drawn wooden towers
covered with posters - as well as ’sandwich-men’ who
carried boards in front and behind them on which advertise-
ments could be placed. The latter were a regular feature of city life
well into the twentieth century and occasionally reappear even
today. However, during the first half of the nineteenth century, adver-
tising in newspapers developed very rapidly indeed. Dr Nevettl has
been able to chart this growth from the House of Commons Accounts
and Papers, since advertising during this period was subject to a
tax.
In 1800 the revenue collected was €76,668 14s Od representing
511,258 advertisements. By 1848 there was €142,674 2s Od collected
This advertising business 5
representing 1,902,322 advertisements (the rate of tax changed over
the period).
Advertising in the press - newspapers and an ever-growing
number and variety of magazines - assumed the major role among all
the other media. In terms of share of total expenditure it still retains
prominence as we enter the second millennium (see Section 1.3.2) in
spite of the growth of first the cinema, then radio and television.
(Radio was the last of these three to carry advertising in the UK
although in many other countries it was an important advertising
medium before television came into being.)
1.2 The development of advertising as a
business
The commercial potential of advertising in a growing number of newspa-
pers and periodicals was quickly grasped by many of the prospering busi-
nesses that developed to serve the expanding populations of the
fast-growing industrial towns. These many advertisers placing the advertis-
ing in a wide range of advertising media waited only for the third partner
to come into being - the advertising agencies. These three groups constitute
the main sections of ‘the advertising business’ - the advertisers spending
money to communicate with their markets, and finding it useful, then as
now, to use advertising agents to place their advertisements in the wide
range of media.
I .2. I The early advertising agencies
It has usually been considered that the original role of advertising agencies
was not their present one of serving the advertisers’ interests (see
Chapter 6).
However, Dr Nevettl makes a strong case that their role has in general
never been greatly different from what it is today, although there may have
been some aberrations along the way.
What the advertiser needed, therefore, was someone who could keep track ofthe rapid
changes taking place in the newspaper world, advise on the suitability ofa particular
journal, write the copy ifrequired, sirnplifi accounting procedures and ease cash flow
problems by granting credit These were the services ofered by the early agents; and as
newspapers began granting them commission, advertisers were able to benefit in effect
‘free of charge’.
According to Nevett, the ’space farmers’ - agents selling space for a single
publication, or a small number of publications - only came into being much
6 The Fundamentals ofAdvertising
later (around the end of the nineteenth century). Even then this was
regarded by many as undesirable and the already established alternative
system of the agent acting on behalf of the advertisers much to be preferred.
Even so Nevett quotes Paul Derricks, head of a well-known advertising
agency, stating in 1907 that of the 336 firms calling themselves advertising
agents: ‘A close scrutiny of the list would prove that according to the modern
accepted definition of the term, fully 300 of 336 are not to be considered as
advertising agents’. This was because all kinds of people sold space on
behalf of the media without in any way offering the service we would now
expect of an advertising agency. So that although Mather and Crowther
(later Ogilvy Mather) had a staff of 100 in 1894 and were already offering an
in-depth service, many ‘agencies‘ were little more than space brokers.
It was well into the twentieth century before fully-developed adver-
tising agencies were operating on any significant scale. The ‘full service
agency’ (see Sections 1.3.1 and 6.2.6) did not really emerge until the middle
of the twentieth century. By the 1980s it was already no longer regarded as
the indisputable norm. A wide variety of types of agency now exists, to suit
the differing needs of advertisers (see Chapter 6).
Advertising agents first appear in the records during the late eight-
eenth century, the earliest known being William Tayler (from an advertise-
ment he himself took in the Maidstone Journal in 1786). James White, friend
of Charles Lamb founded an agency in 1800. In 1812 the partnership of
Lawson & Barker started, soon to be known as Charles Barker and contin-
uing under the same name to this day. (In 1981 the Charles Barker group
was the tenth largest agency in Europe in terms of gross income, but later
lost that status the agency business is a very volatile one.)
-
I .2.2 Some early advertisers
Newspapers could and did sometimes survive without advertising
revenue but increasingly became dependent on it. Advertising agents cer-
tainly cannot exist on their own. But the real basis of the rapidly growing
advertising business was the advertisers who financed it all.
Some of today’s big spenders on advertising are companies who were
already using advertising early in the nineteenth century - Crosse &
Blackwell, Schweppes and Hedges and Butler among them. At that time,
according to Nevett, the most important category of advertising was auc-
tioneers’ notices with 16 per cent of the total, followed by retailers with 13
per cent. Medical products advertising represented only 6.5 per cent
although then and since they attracted a disproportionate amount of atten-
tion because of their outrageously extravagant claims such as that for Dr
Roberts’ ’Poor Man‘s Friend’ ointment in 1855, offering . .. a certain cure for
ulcerated sore legs, if of 20 years standing, cuts, burns, scalds, bruises,
chilblains, scorbutil eruptions, and pimples on the face, sore and inflamed
eyes, and cancerous tumours . . .’
This advertising business 7
Dr Nevett notes, ‘By mid-century there were some obvious changes in
the advertisement columns, reflecting the growing division between man-
ufacturing and retailing. More retailers seem to have been using the news-
papers ...’ This division grew of course and as mass manufacture
developed, the ‘typical’ advertiser became the manufacturer using advert-
ising both to create demand amongst his consumers but also to exert pres-
sure on retailers to stock his products.
Only in the mid-twentieth century have we seen a substantial check in
this development. The growing size and power of large retail chains has
switched the emphasis back to retailers’ advertising expenditure. This
point is discussed in Section 2.3.5.
However, this brief look at history shows that there is nothing new
about retailers investing in advertising expenditure on a large scale. Thus
Heals spent €6,000 in 1855 and by the early years of the twentieth century
Gordon Selfridge was spending f36,OOO on promoting his new shop even
before it opened.
Nor is the 1980s’ emphasis on ’below-the-line’p romotion (see Chapter
8) anything new. As Nevett says, ‘When Jesse Boot opened a new shop, he
hired a brass band, sandwich-men to parade the street, a Salvation Army
man (normally employed by the company as a packer) to walk around
with a bell proclaiming the merits of Boots’ products and sometimes a
coach-and-four carrying advertising placards, quite apart from using the
more normal methods of bill distributing and festooning the upper storeys
of his shops with signs.’ David Lewis in Liverpool in 1886 chartered the
Great Eastern as a floating exhibition to promote his stores (it attracted
some half million visitors).
I .3 The current advertising scene
These developments taking place over many centuries but with increasing
pace in the past 150 years, have produced a complex and highly sophisti-
cated business. Basically the pattern established during the nineteenth
century is unchanged. Advertisers, both manufacturers and retailers, con-
tinue to spend increasing sums of money on promoting their products. A
strong development in recent years, however, has been the increasing
expenditure on ‘cause‘ advertising (see Section 2.3.12) and advertising by
the government (see Section 2.3.9). Many companies too spend massive
sums of money not simply on product promotion but also on ’corporate’
advertising, to communicate with a wide range of audiences in order to
improve and maintain good relationships with them - advertising being
used as part of the company’s public relations activity (see Section 8.7).
The top UK advertisers in 1996 (according to Register-MEAL, listed in
the Advertising Association‘s Marketing Yearbook for 1996) are shown in
Table 1.1.