Examples of creative advertising include billboards, radio, TV, newspaper, Internet banner ads and magazines. Businesses use creative advertising to gain name recognition. When we think about a hamburger what fast food restaurant comes to mind? For most it is Mc Donald’s. When we think of tissue paper what brand name comes to mind? Because Kleenex is so well branded most people refer to tissue paper as Kleenex. It literally took thousands of impressions in order for us to permanently link the brand to the product.
Because there are thousands of businesses competing for our business we are bombarded with 2500 impressions a day. We could be driving out in the middle of nowhere with the radio off and have some car drive past us when we notice the Mercedes symbol. Two reasons that businesses use creative advertising is to one, brand they and two create sales. As stated above, TV, radio, print media and Internet are good ways to do creative advertising.
So what happens when we have been enticed by a billboard ad? We turn to directional type advertising. Years ago the first place we would look was the yellow pages. This is where many businesses missed the boat. Yellow pages were the media that tied all your advertising efforts. Imagine that an acupuncture ad conveys pain relief. A potential customer goes to the phone book to find the business. While they are looking up the phone number they see a competitors ad that is bigger and better. They ultimately do business with the yellow page advertiser. What a sad way to loose business to a yellow page advertiser. This is a classic example of directional advertising. That yellow page ad was designed to direct business directly to that business. The other and ever increasing media type that is directional is an Internet search engine. Because of the expense of yellow pages and a multitude of directories to choose from I encourage my clients to have a solid Internet presence. Often times I refer them to AbsoluteWebworks. They specialize in local searches.