An Advertising Brief:
An advertising brief (for when you prepare yours) is more like a high level overview of the entire advertising strategy.
The advertising strategy brief for “Sleeping With The Enemy” was a document written to put everyone on the same page.
I've included a copy of our original advertising brief (for your benefit) that took our brand national (below).
Start of Advertising Strategy Brief
1) Position our product as “1 star” accommodation, but a “5 star” experience.
2) Invest heavily into our brand personality - anchor it to what’s already in our consumers’ mind.
- Student accommodation on holidays.
- House cleaning premierships that mirror the English premier league football.
3) Position our brand as “the first of its kind”.
- A hybrid between commercially managed backpacker hostel accommodation, and independent shared living (without a legal commitment or tenancy).
- Achieve this by accompanying brand advertising in traditional media, with street level advertising campaigns on non-commercial (shared living) notice boards.
4) Accompany our notice board advertising with a commission structure to garnish sales support from existing lodgers within the properties.
- Pay $50 commissions on all sales where lodger turnaround is 0 days. (where a new lodger moves in the same day the departing lodger move out --- bed sold within our 7 day notice window).
- Commissions are held in trust, totals displayed on our website and released monthly to house captains. (each household can use their commission pool to fund a monthly housemate event driven by house captains).
Note: Commissions paid one-in, all-in to place upward pressure on housemates assisting sales to maintain a 100% occupancy.
5) Accompany our advertising strategy with nightly house sales tours. (In a bus playing videos of housemate parties, between 5pm & 7pm --- when lodgers are getting home from work).
- Ad creative must be intriguing enough to prompt people to visit our website.
- Our website is to drive visitors into sign-up for a seat on our daily house (sales) tour.
- House tour guides must be charismatic lodgers, the most popular housemates preferred.
6) Accompany this advertising strategy with a merchandising strategy:
- All housemates winning our monthly clean house premiership to receive T-Shirts.
House Name (EG “The Zoo”) Sleeping With The Enemy Champions March, 2000...
- Give every departing lodger a T-Shirt, and a pack of playing cards.
I Slept With The Enemy Sydney Australia, 2000
7) Place ads on beer coasters. Pay bars frequented by backpackers an advertising fee to use our beer coasters, instead of their own.
End of Advertising Strategy Brief
Backpacker travel magazines were cramped with lots of poor quality advertising.
Our ads on full page spreads got a lot of attention because the images were attention grabbing. Our ads became famous throughout the industry because they said so much about the brand, without using words.
The respect for quality of advertising alone portrayed the brand as an intelligent market leader.
Our merchandise (Beer Coasters, T-Shirts, Key Rings and Playing Cards), all supported our advertising strategy. Our ads were talking points so it seemed logical to place them on items, or clothing that ex-customers would have on their person, whilst travelling the globe amongst like minded consumers (our target market).
Great conversation starters.
All about us!
As you can see, the right advertising strategy encompasses more than just ads. An advertising strategy takes into account everything that supports the advertising, within a framework of supporting “the marketing strategy”.
A marketing strategy takes into account everything that supports the business objective.
A great example to articulate the difference between an advertising and marketing strategy is tourism Australia, visit “Australia” campaign (2010).
Lobbying the Australian Government for Grants and tax concessions to help “fund” Baz Luhrmann’s film, “Australia”, with a view to attracting other international film makers to shoot more films in Australia was part of "a marketing strategy".
The advertising strategy was to advertise the film globally, with the emphasis on Australian landscapes to generate exposure for Australia as a tourist destination (world-wide).
Be Interested. Not Interesting!
Simon U Ford
Engage Smarter!
P.S. We got everything right with this business. It happened organically and grew naturally. In my next start-up I blew $1.7 million dollars getting it all wrong. I’ll tell you all about the mistakes in my next [SMARTER] eMail.
P.S.S. About that question I asked you to think about and the key that unlocked my online success, it lay in the difference between success and failure, of these two start-ups.