1. Give your campaign a chance. Knee jerk changes and cancellations to a campaign is dangerous. It takes time for a campaign to build. A consumer usually needs to see your ad several times before they will act.

2. If your campaign is successful - don't mess with it. Many times people see something going well, and they want to change it, "just because". The old saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" fits here.

3. Don't get sold. Advertising sales people will often come to you with packages that better benefit their company's financial goals than yours.

4. Don't mix advertising messages. Keep each message simple so you're not bombarding the customer with too many calls to action or overwhelming laundry lists.

5. Don't overcrowd your ads. Too many small words on a page or billboard causes the reader to gloss over the ad, thus ignoring it.

6. Don't spread yourself too thin. Unless you have a bottomless advertising budget, it doesn't make sense to advertise in every single small publication. As long as you're using a mixture of media outlets (TV, radio, web, print, outdoor) and targeting your audience, your message will get to the people you want it to get to.

7. Don't think your sales reps are all your friends. Some actually are friends, but at the end of the day everyone is working for their own paycheck and often times sales reps have monthly goals or contests they must participate in. Never lose sight of your own goals and needs.

1. Make sure your campaign is made up of a media mix. (TV, radio, interactive, print, out-of-home, mobile). In today's world, there are so many mediums that it's almost overwhelming. Now, more than ever, you have to make sure you advertise in different areas to reach the most amount people.

2. Keep your campaign image consistent. Do not revamp your look too often. The more a consumer recognizes your product, the better chance they have of remembering it and making a purchase.

3. Practice the art of repetition. The customer needs to see or hear your product name a minimum of 3 times before it's ingrained in their memories.

4. Make sure you properly research your target market. You do not want to waste precious advertising dollars reaching the wrong people.

5. Remember who your target customer is and try to speak to their needs rather than alienate them by trying something too newfangled. Change is good but change for the sake of change could end up costing your company/product more than money.

6. Get your product/company involved in community events. Involvement shows people you care about your/their community and leads to word of mouth advertising because of your great reputation.

7. Include social media in your campaigns! Blogging, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are powerful tools that can spread the word about your product, event or service to create invaluable two-way communication directly to your customers.

Traditional media, most notably print media, has taken a hit to online reading and consumption. Radio and TV consumption have also been reduced by various other devices and modes of auditory and visual communication. But, they still command large audience attention. Outdoor still rules in mass instant impressions even though it continues to fight the visual environmentalists.

Social media is now drawing more and more attention. A Facebook or Twitter page with 5,000 followers is powerful. But it still does not equal a radio station with a weekly cumulative audience of 150,000 or a TV spot that hits a few million people nationally. Because viral and social media takes time, it is not real mass media which can hit many with a message in an instant. Large internet sites such as Yahoo, AOL, as well as ad networks are mass media and as such have joined the product line.

But there are "experts" who are selling social media as a replacement for mass media. Social media is an activation of and an adjunct to the mass media message, but it is not an effective brand builder over a short time because its "some-at-a-time" nature makes the short-term audience limited. The long-term audience potential is great, but to put all of the budget against this and to abandon a mix of real mass media is very short-sighted and is the thing that the irresponsible marketers do because it all sounds so good.

Success comes in the volume of messages over the shortest time period. And the campaign with the greatest number of impressions brings the best results.

By Bob Leffler
CEO/Owner

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

The University of Kansas Jayhawks spring game is Saturday, April 24 and the advertising campaign to promote the game, as well as season ticket packages for the 2010 season has just launched using a complete media mix with a new theme, Rock Chalk Saturday's.

The media mix includes a robust outdoor campaign including an extremely unique opportunity on the Kansas Turnpike as you leave Lawrence headed toward Kansas City. These three boards represent the power of the advertising theme and utilizes its superior locations next to the University.

As we learned from a previous entry, outdoor advertising must be BIG, BOLD and CLUTTER FREE. We have executed all of these principles and combined them with a unique media opportunity to make for an extremely effective start to the Jayhawks advertising campaign.

With the advent of digital video recorders (DVR), it became a growing issue for people to track their TV watching. More often than not, people would have to guess at which TV in the house they were watching and which programs they'd viewed. Only recently was there an option in the diary to note that a program was viewed on DVR, along with the specific date and time the program originally aired.

Needless to say, the system was flawed and a new method was necessary. Enter the Local People Meters or LPM's for short.

Too many marketing representatives in the sports industry think that advertising on one seemingly high-interest website or on one targeted medium will rock the registers. The problem is that each website and each social media output is a media outlet. Potential spend customers spend far less time on any one media outlet than they used to because their options are so numerous.

We used to be able to fairly accurately predict ad consumption habits because of there were a finite number of outlets. Now with infinite outlets, we must match the most likely sites and social media opportunities in network fashion with the standard media, which is less consumed, BUT nevertheless still consumed. The end product is still a presentation of MASS MEDIA; however, and not a dusting of a few media products.

For sports marketing professionals to hit big results, you have to reach big numbers of people.

Advertising is about repetition of the same message to an adequate number of "potentials" in order to engender a positive result. As a rookie, I learned that the greatest ad, seen by too few people, will fail. Twenty-six years later we still have people in our business touting "amazing creative" without anything behind it. That is positively the wrong approach and is the reason why there are so many changes of ad agencies.

Expectations need to be in line with funding levels for the media behind the creative. And there needs to be a complete marketing outreach picture with direct personal marketing, proper merchandising and purchase incentives. Otherwise you have folks hoping for a miracle or experimenting endlessly instead of going in a direction and funding the approach.

By Bob Leffler
CEO/Owner

The questions arise, however as follows: How many schools still have not decided ticket prices and not even had an "after action" meeting on 2009? Signing Day is now like NFL draft day in pro football. It is an opportunity to have a nice promotion, put ticket deposits on sale for new STs and push renewals of the old. But, if you haven't even reserved a room on campus or held back some trade media that will run easily in February and March, your marketing operation is squandering a natural "wallets open" opportunity.

If this description fits your program, you still have time to get it together. College marketers and their "purse strings" bosses sometimes think it is OK to wait. Every lost sales opportunity is lost for good because the ticket store was "closed" on that day. That is just factual.

The lack of knowledge and respect for roll-out advertising is astonishing. It is why so many of these efforts fail and a lot of money is lost as well as the dreams of the creators of the concept. The agency values its product and never becomes a co-risk taker. We let these folks know about a proper level of investment advertising that has a very poor initial ROI but is a necessity if they are ever going to penetrate the market place.

Sadly, the answer is usually negative to our estimates. What follows most of the time is failure to hit the market, let alone stay in it. The lesson is as follows: Budget for investment advertising and give yourself a chance to be known.

Since our society relies on the use of two thumbs to communicate all across the world, people have been spoiled with the overabundance of convenience forcing them to expect the same simplicity in product advertisements. Simplicity is the only way for companies to go if they want their advertisements to have the same effect on consumers as they had prior to the new technologically obsessed era.