(This post is part of a series created to help you help your advertising agency create effective communications for your business.)

So, why do you want to advertise?

Did you improve your product or service? Did you get an award?

Is your competition coming up with a product or service that you’ve had for so long, but didn’t advertise?

Is there something in the news about one of the ingredients in your product, or an incident involving your service? Are you celebrating an anniversary of sorts?

Tell us all about it.

After all, it’s your story.

You’ll have to tell us first.

Want to tell us all about your company, your products, services and their stories? We might be able to help you tell those stories better.

Contact us at info@prodigyads.com and see how we can help.

(This post is part of a series created to help you help your advertising agency create  effective communications for your business.)

It’s basic, but something that keeps falling through the cracks when clients and their accounts people create the agency brief: the objective. Sure, that box is often filled in different ways ranging from the obvious (to create a tri-media campaign) to the more obvious (to advertise xxxxx product) to the even more obvious (to sell XXXXX product) to the okay but generic (to communicate xxxx as the product/service/company of choice). Often, this happens when people directly copy paste the brilliant marketing presentation from the last corporate planning session and hand it off to agency.

What’s the advertising objective?

Every piece of work, whether it’s something you intend to do yourself or something you’re going to assign to your agency, has to have an objective. For too many people, however, coming out with a TV commercial/print ad/brochure/flyer/billboard/music video is the whole objective. Unfortunately, these are the same people who believe all you have to do is get your name and brand out there, and people will automatically fall in love with their product and buy.

So what is it?

First of all, let’s look at what it’s not.

“To sell xxxx” is a marketing objective, not an advertising objective. You can add all you want about what kind of market share you want to get out of it, how many trials and the like, it still doesn’t change it from a marketing objective to an advertising objective.

“To come out with a TV commercial” on its own is a production objective, not an advertising objective. If this is the objective you give your agency, you’re just leaving your money on the table, and you really can’t blame anyone if your product looks and feels like every other parity product out there.

“To communicate xxxx as the product of choice” is not an advertising objective, but it is, at least, a third of one.

What is the advertising objective? Put simply, what do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to talk to, what do you want to say, and how do you want to say it?

That is your objective. Think about it for a while, and we’ll go into specifics next time.

This post is the beginning of a series created to help you help your advertising agency create the most effective communications for your business requirements. We hope you will find it useful.

So you want to advertise your business, your brand, your product or service. You call your advertising agency, then tell them what you want.

Unless you’re really clear on what you want, chances are, it’s going to take a very long time to come up with an effective ad. Okay, scratch that, it would be very easy to come up with one ad if all you want is your name, logo and product and what your product does.

Here’s the problem. That’s not going to be very effective.

You will need to brief the agency properly. If your advertising agency knows what its doing, they  will be asking you plenty of questions about the ad you want. You will need to be prepared to answer those questions if you want to get the most out of your money.

Here are some of the questions:

Why do you want an ad? (Yes, that’s a relevant question. We’ll accept “because I want one” as an answer if that’s all you’ve got, but it might not be as helpful as a better answer.

Just an ad? Or a campaign?

If it’s a campaign, single medium or multi-media?

Who are we talking to?

What do you want to say?

How do you want to say it?

How much do you want to spend?

And more.

All the answers to these questions are important. Now, if time is of the essence, and you do not want to be playing telephone tag with your agency, scheduling meetings, answering the same questions all over, there’s one document that you will need to be familiar with.

We call it the advertising brief. It’s the same meeting, with the same questions and the answers to those questions, but condensed on a piece of paper.

More importantly, it’s also the document that you will need to create an effective ad, and  the same document you will be using to judge whether or not your advertising agency is doing what you are paying it to do– create effective advertising for you.

The next few posts will discuss the parts of the advertising brief and how you can use it in order to ensure effective communications for your business.

Watch out for it. If you’re in a hurry, however, drop us an email at info@prodigyads.com, and we can talk about the brief and other ways we can help.