Brand Planning : 56 How to Manage the Budget Across Brand Portfolio

The principles of our approach apply to all marketing inputs but the focus will be on advertising. Advertising itself has experienced the same trend to accountability: the 1980s and early 1990s saw a focus on understanding how advertising works – of course there is no definitive answer, but a lot has been learned and people use the model they feel most at home with. Over the last few years the interest has swung more towards understanding
how the media budget works. This change in emphasis has stemmed from a gradual realisation that buying advertising time is actually 90% of the advertising budget, together with pressure from the financial department to quantify the return.

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Brand Planning : 55 How To Use the Budget Better

Quick Brief

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Brand Planning : 54 Setting the Communications Budget

This article discusses how we can answer the communications budget question – and linked questions such as 'How do I divide it across my portfolio of brands?' The key is not a new statistical technique or model, but a modern, contemporary approach to statistical analysis, tailored to the specific problem, incorporating quantitative and qualitative inputs.

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Brand Planning : 53 Using Media to Get Under the Radar

Using media is not merely about planning and buying anymore. It is about thinking. It is about ideas, as well as numbers. This requires a different kind of person from the traditional number cruncher who stayed miles away from the creative department. The new media person must be a real ad enthusiast, the kind of person who does not go to the bathroom or get a beer the moment the commercial comes on.
The media department is the new creative department. And when it is working properly it can be the lead factor in getting a message under the radar.

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Brand Planning : 52 Using modelling to improve media laydown

In this case history, Paul Dyson, Millward Brown International, describes how a model based on an enhanced Awareness Index was used to improve substantially the efficiency of a client's media schedule



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Brand Planning : 51 How to Schedule TV

At first sight, the debate about how to schedule TV seems to be only about bars on a media plan. How many TRPs in each week? Should they be in flights or bursts? Or should the schedule be as continuous as affordable, which recency theory suggests? Or is there a better pattern, matched to the brand situation and communication objectives?

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Brand Planning : 50 A brief guided tour through the copy-testing jungle

Copy testing embraces a number of quite radically different techniques, based on different theories and assumptions about how advertising works.

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Brand Planning : 49 The Hitchhikers Guide to Media Issues in Pre-Testing

Today’s marketers are confronted by an array of media options, more advertising -literate consumers, a fragmentation of media consumption patterns and rapid increases in the volume of branded communications.

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Brand Planning : Pre-Testing Radical Advertising

 moment early in the creative process when someone asks, ‘Is this going into a pre-test?’ It is not simply a matter of pressure on the schedule: quant pre-testing can stop everything dead, despite all the meetings, creative development work and various incarnations of the ad. One hears agencies and clients complaining that something has to ‘get through’ a quant pre-test: it has become the Beecher’s Brook of ad development research, and many ads fall at it.

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Brand Planning : 46 Using Integrated Marketing To Drive Brand Value

Simply put, marketing needs to be re-integrated – which is what integrated marketing (IM) is designed to do. Integrated marketing is a cross-functional process for managing profitable brand relationships by bringing people and corporate learning together in order to maintain strategic consistency in brand communications, facilitate purposeful dialogue with customers and other stakeholders, and market a corporate mission that increases
brand trust.

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Brand Planning : 45 Event Sponsorship

Brand sponsorship at dance music events is now worth tens of millions of pounds. With mainstream brands like Nescafé joining the more obviously youth targeted and, some might argue, more relevant brands like Rizla, Durex Carling and Smirnoff, should we not have been expecting some sort of consumer backlash?

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Brand Planning : 44 Using Sponsorships To Connect With New Consumers

Event marketing and corporate sponsorships are critical tools in reaching today’s new consumer efficiently and cost-effectively. The mass homogenization market is a thing of the past and the multitude of new products and constant advertising continue to clutter shelves, airwaves and consumers’ minds. Sponsorships are an effective way to cut through the clutter and differentiate the brand in a direct, personalized manner.


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Brand Planning : 43 Integrated Marketing,

The visible cost of the sponsorship will arouse a great deal of comment, but those responsible for the investment will know that the true cost will certainly be much higher (perhaps by a factor of three or even up to eight).’
Nevertheless this important sector of the market has been growing rapidly as the demand for high-profile sponsorship opportunities increases and communication agencies provide innovative solutions to complement their advertising for their clients.

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Brand Planning : 42 Defining a Successful Special Event

A successful special event is one that helps a company or group meet a specific marketing objective – increasing awareness, building brand/product goodwill and introducing a brand/product. Like all other components of a marketing plan, a special event should have a measurable objective, a business rationale, a marketing strategy and supporting executional tactics. Additionally, a special event should have a project manager who creates and administers a task list, a timeline and a line item budget.

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Brand Planning : 40 How to handle promotions

Successful promotions demand the efficient handling of consumer response

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Brand Planning : 41 Using Celebrities Effectively

Given the preoccupation with celebrity advertising, it is not surprising to discover that a number of research studies have examined the phenomenon. Stevens (3) distinguishes companies using celebrities in a one-off way through to those who integrate the star into the marketing strategy. More recently Erdogan and Kitchen (4) argued that celebs fulfil one of two roles – 'brand spokesman' or 'added interest' factor.

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Brand Planning : 39 How To Get Your Promotion Right

Manufacturers of branded goods operate product-related sales promotions to gain share over branded competitors and to fight own-label and the 'everyday low pricing' policies of the major grocery retailers – increasingly driven by price not quality.

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Brand Planning : 38 The Five Golden Rules of Online Branding

In the world of online advertising, click-through is viewed as the primary measure of advertising effectiveness. This metric quantifies how marketing communication can be directly linked to immediate consumer action.

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3Brand Planning : 37 How data is driving many of today's most innovative marketing programs

How data is driving many of today's most innovative marketing programs

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Brand Planning : 36 Proving Radio Works

Many advertisers clearly do believe in radio, spending large amounts of money on it each year although even they require proof of the effectiveness of their campaigns.

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