The Advertising Business: Operations, Creativity, Media Planning, and Integrated Communications

Citation

Menon, M. (2000), "The Advertising Business: Operations, Creativity, Media Planning, and Integrated Communications", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 17 No. 6, pp. 550-560. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2000.17.6.550.2

On reading the articles contained in The Advertising Business, I felt a bit nostalgic for my previous life as an agency professional and realized that the more things change the more the fundamentals remain the same. This is a balanced book of readings that exposes the art of advertising in a comprehensive and understandable manner. At the outset, one will notice the coherency of the articles that are assembled under various topics. Moreover, articles under each topic also have a logical flow between them with respect to the activities within an agency.

The introductory chapter is a splendid overview of the industry with discussions on advertising expenditures and their growth in the USA, the players and their roles within the challenging environment of advertising.

Part I introduces the reader to the operations of an agency from an insider point of view. In order to understand this view, articles by Mower and Jones are especially invaluable. The global perspectives of the articles with both US and UK perspectives is extremely useful to the practitioner. This section of the book amply highlights all the major agency functions, including client acquisition, account planning and management, the creative and media processes. This section also contains a superb review of the history and current status of the agency compensation systems.

Part II provides a fresh look at some of the traditional techniques utilized in advertising to get the message across to the consumer. Although the section has a few articles that are theory‐oriented, they are not academic in nature. These articles afford the reader a solid basis for understanding the use and efficacy of various message dissemination techniques used in advertising. The practitioner should have no difficulty in understanding both the theory and practical applications discussed in these articles. The section highlights some of the most frequently used tools to break through the advertising clutter, such as humor, emotions, comparison advertising, and the use of celebrities.

Part III on media is a short one with articles on some of the basics such as definitions, exposure scheduling, and syndication techniques. A reader who is a practitioner of advertising will find the quantitative aspects of these articles very valuable in trying to effectively reach the target market. This discussion is followed by another that provides a reality check – the concept of diminishing returns in advertising expenditures. It also provides fair treatment of cable as a viable advertising medium. An article or two about the newest of all media, the Internet, would have made this section complete.

Part IV discusses the often neglected (academically) area that is an integral part of the advertising business: sales promotions and specialty media. This section is written for the new millennium with effective discussions on online strategies and other forms of direct‐to‐customer marketing. The roadmap presented in the online article includes questions every marketer should ask himself/herself before plunging into the new medium. The articles on specialty advertising, event and sports marketing, and B2B advertising were excellent, and they captured the essence of what the future holds for traditional marketing. The treatment of integrated marketing communications, a concept that has been in and out of favor among practitioners, is very balanced with both the academic and practitioner (case study) perspectives. It makes the reader take a second look at the viability of this concept. The final two articles in this section review packaging and public relations as offshoots of advertising and provide clear evidence of their effectiveness.

Part V includes articles about First Amendment rights of advertisers and the role of ethics in advertising. The first article provides an historical background and perspective to the US Supreme Court decisions on the matter of rights of commercial speech makers and aptly offers an open‐ended conclusion since it is an evolving issue with no finality in sight. The second article highlights the applicability of ethics in advertising, a discussion of advertising areas that begs ethical questioning, and finally reviews a scheme for the inclusion of ethical decision‐making in advertising.

A minor weakness of the book might be its emphasis on traditional advertising strategies at the expense of the newer technology oriented strategies, including the Internet. Overall, the book is a well‐written, coherently clustered set of articles that every marketing/advertising practitioner must acquire and read. It has a delightful mix of discussions by practitioners and academics with some practical experience. The breadth of coverage should appeal to the professionals. As such, it makes great reading for those in the agency profession and those intending to be a part of it. Most books in the field read like college textbooks. But The Advertising Business is vastly superior to any of them in its insightful treatment of the business of advertising.