April 28, 2010

Over Analysis Kills

Advertising is really simple to understand if marketing professionals would just use logic and understand how the human brain works.

The two functions, absorbing a message (memory) and acting on it (the effective domain of the brain), are what it is all about. That means that there must be a media mix for an ad campaign to work.

Outdoor (aka out-of-home), radio, mobile SMS messaging, and TV primarily talk to memory because they are momentary messages that come in multiples. Print, internet and direct mail can be controlled by the individual because they are at consumers fingertips and can be reconsidered. They are the prompts to messages that are in the memory and can result in action or purchase.

If you don't understand this and you seek to analyze pieces of the media mix, you have the potential to KILL the campaign by declaring a piece of the puzzle as ineffective.

The Leffler Agency once had a client who insisted we cancel radio from a radio-print mix because the customers were not putting it down on one of those sophomoric exit polls that the company had created. We killed the radio and the campaign died because no cognitive messaging took place. The moral of the story...DON'T MESS WITH THE MIX!

By Bob Leffler
CEO/Owner