To give you an idea of how big the industry is -- that is, how much money is involved -- take a look at the top 10 advertisers (according to Advertising Age magazine) for 1998. Click on the image and a larger one will appear in a new window. The figures shown are in thousands of dollars; General Motors, for instance, spent $2.9 billion on advertising in 1998.

What is advertising?

To get a handle on this thing called advertising, keep in mind the following things:

• Advertising means of selling a product. It’s not about creativity, although that's part of it. An advertiser pays you money to help him or her sell something. If what you write doesn’t help the advertiser sell a product, the advertiser will stop paying you. And you will starve.

• Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. We made the point above. It's worth noting again. There’s lots of money flowing through this industry.

• Advertising copywriting is a complex process. People don't just wake up in the middle of the night, jot down a few inspired thoughts and go out and create award-winning ads. Copywriting is a complex, serious business and goes through many levels and drafts.

• Advertising is a competitive business. Because so much money is involved, lots of people are trying to make it in this business. Getting and keeping a job can be a difficult process.

So what does it take to survive?

Personally, you need to have a sense of salesmanship. Ultimately, you shouldn't be shy about asking people to give you their money. You also need to be disciplined and hardworking -- traits you should have or should be working on right now.

Above all, you should know how to use the language clearly and efficiently. Advertisers will be paying you to write copy that sells. They want you to do it quickly and efficiently. If you don't do that, they will pay somebody else to do it.

In addition to asking advertisers for their money, you will be asking consumers for their time and attention -- not an easy thing to get these days.

So, you have to know how to use the language.

One note: The quickest way to get into the advertising industry is to take a job on a newspaper advertising staff. Newspapers are constantly looking for people who can go out and sell ads. And part of selling ads is designing ads. Learn how to use a computer to do this -- particularly Quark Xpress, the page layout program that is the industry standard.

Criticisms of advertising

Before going any further, we should note some of the most common criticisms of advertising. These criticisms have some validity, but they also have some answers. I'll present the criticisms and leave it to you to formulate some of the answers.

• Advertising adds to the cost of products. Part of what we pay for when we buy a bar of soap or a new car is the advertising for that product. What if General Motors stopped spending $2.9 billion a year on advertising and reduced the cost of its vehicles.

• Advertising helps sell inferior products. When you get down to it, this criticism says that advertising lies. It convinces us that products are good when they aren’t. It convinces us to buy an inferior product over a quality product because the inferior product has been advertised more.

• Advertising creates needs and desires that we would not have otherwise. We MUST have certain products that our parents were perfectly happy living without. Advertising, it is argued, often creates these “needs,” which aren’t really needs at all.

Okay, what are the counterpoints to these criticisms?

Formulating advertising copy

When we think about beginning to write advertising copy, we should think about four things first: product, audience, purpose and medium.

Product

It's simple and basic, but sometimes we forget to ask the question:

• What is the product? What does the product do? An advertising copywriter needs to think about the product being advertising. And he or she need to thoroughly understand the product. As much as possible, the copywriter should know the technical aspects of the product, what function it is supposed to perform. Then comes another series of questions:

• What are the product’s characteristics?

• What VERBS describe the product?

• What distinguishes the product?

• What benefits does the product offer?

Audience

Advertisers (manufacturers) do not want to sell their products to everybody in the world. (That may seem like an odd statement. Why would it be true?)

Instead, they sell to an “audience” or a “market.” Advertising copywriters must understand this concept of the audience.

• Who is most likely to use the product? Who makes buying decisions? Try to think of instances where the people who use a product are different from people who make buying decisions.

• What demographic characteristics does the audience have? Male-female, young-old, rich-poor, black-white, educated-not educated -- these are some of the ways that audiences are divided. These are demographic characteristics.

Given these demographics, we might then ask:

• What are the needs of the audience?

• How will the product meet the needs?

• What appeals are most likely to work?

Purpose

Here were are finally getting into the advertising copywriting process. Good advertising copy is based on research. The importance of research cannot be overestimated. Research helps focus our advertising efforts by giving us information about the following questions:

• What problem should the advertising attempt to solve?

• What position does the product have in the marketplace?

• What position should it have?

Medium

Advertising copywriters must understand what all MC102 students have learned by how -- writing for different media requires different things. Beyond that, they should understand the concepts of reach and frequency.

Reach has to do with how many people will see or hear your advertising message. Frequency means how many times they will hear or see this message. Reach and frequency are important parts of an advertising campaign.

In addition, the advertising copywriter must understand:

• Which medium is the best buy for the product you are selling?

• Which medium will allow the advertising to reach the target audience?

• What are the demands of the medium?

Key facts and ad problems

Research, as we mentioned before, is a necessary ingredient to good advertising copy. Research helps us form key facts, advertising problems and advertising objectives. Here’s an example of how it work.

Fact: People don’t realize how inexpensive our product is.

Problem: Our product has a poor price reputation.

We got the fact from the research that had been done on the product. From that, we can deduce an advertising problem.

Fact: New products in the market have many of the characteristics of our product.

Problem: Our problem is becoming indistinguishable from others in the market.

From those problems we can form an advertising objective to solve those problems. It gives us a more focused goal for the question:

What do we want the consumer to do?

Taking the two problems above, we might say that the advertising object is that we want consumers to:

• understand that our product is more inexpensive than others

• understand that our product differs markedly from others and differs in ways that will benefit the consumer.

We’ll talk more about how all this works next week.

News quiz questions

Many of the answers to many of the news quiz questions for lecture on Monday can be found at Dateline Alabama, the news site of the College of Communication and Information Sciences.