7/27/2019 Communication Goals of Advertising

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Communication Goals of Advertising

After media planners define the target audience for a media plan, they set communication goals: to what degree the target audience must be exposed to (and interact with) brand messages in order to achieve advertising and marketing objectives. For example, one communication goal can be that 75 percent of the target audience will see the brand in television commercials at least once during a periodof three months. Another communication goal is that 25 percent of the target audience will form a preference for a new brand in the first month of the brand launch. The different communication goals can be better understood in a hierarchy of advertising objectives, such as Bill Harvey's expansion of an earlier model ofAdvertising Research Foundation (ARF).[18]The expanded ARF model has ten levels, as shown in Figure 1. The first three levels of goals from the bottom -- vehicle distribution, vehicle exposure, and advertising exposure -- are particularly relevant for media planning. Vehicle distribution refers to the coverage of a media vehicle, such as the number of copies that a magazine or newspaper issue has, or the number of households that can tunein to a given television channel. Vehicle exposure refers to the number of individuals exposed to the media vehicle, such as the number of people who read a magazine or watched a television program. Advertising exposure refers to the number of individuals exposed an ad or a commercial itself.It is important to note the difference between vehicle exposure and advertisingexposure for many media with editorial content. For example, not all audience members of a television program will watch all the commercials interspersed in the

program. A study shows that only 68 percent of television audiences watch the commercials in television programs.[19] Vehicle exposure represents only an opportunity to see an ad, not necessarily that the ad has actually been seen. In reality, advertising exposure is rarely measured, and media planners use vehicle exposure as a proxy measure of advertising exposure.Another group of communication goals is advertising recall, advertising persuasion, leads and sales. Advertising recall represents the cognitive effect of the ad, advertising persuasion represents the emotional effect of the ad, and leads and sales are the behavioral effects of the ad. Each can be specified in a mediaplan as a communication goal. For example, a communication goal can specify that50% of the target audience will recall the radio ad during the month of the campaign, or that a campaign will generate 3000 leads.