Audience Measurement in Transit Advertising As with outdoor

advertising, the cost basis for transit is the number of showings. In transit advertising, a 100 showing means one ad appears on or in each vehicle in the system; a showing of 50 means half of the vehicles carry the ad. If you are placing such ads on taxicabs, it may be impossible to determine who is being exposed to them.

Rate information comes from the sellers of transit advertising, and audience information is very limited. So much of the information marketers need to purchase transit ads does not come from purely objective sources.

Promotional Products Marketing

According to the Promotional Products Association International (PPA), promotional products marketing is "the advertising or promotional medium or method that uses promotional products, such as ad specialties, premiums, business gifts, awards, prizes, or commemoratives." Promotional products marketing is the more up-to-date name for what used to be called specialty advertising. Specialty advertising has now been provided with a new definition:

A medium of advertising, sales promotion, and motivational communication employing imprinted, useful, or decorative products called advertising specialties, a subset of promotional products.

Unlike premiums, with which they are sometimes confused (called advertising specialties), these articles are always distributed free—recipients don't have to earn the specialty by making a purchase or contribution.14

As you can see from these descriptions, specialty advertising is often considered both an advertising and a sales promotion medium. In our discussion, we treat it as a supportive advertising medium in the IMC program (Exhibit 13-10).

There are over 15,000 advertising specialty items, including ballpoint pens, coffee mugs, key rings, calendars, T-shirts, and matchbooks. Unconventional specialties such as plant holders, wall plaques, and gloves with the advertiser's name printed on them are also used to promote a company or its product; so are glassware, trophies, awards, and vinyl products. In fact, advertisers spend over $16.5 billion per year on specialty advertising items. The increased use of this medium makes it the fastest-growing of all advertising or sales promotion media.15

If you stop reading for a moment and look around your desk (or bed or beach blanket), you'll probably find some specialty advertising item nearby. It may be the pen you are using, a matchbook, or even a book cover with the campus bookstore name on it. (Figure 13-7 shows the percentage of sales by product category.) Specialty items are used for many promotional purposes: to thank a customer for patronage, keep the name of the company in front of consumers, introduce new products, or reinforce the name of an existing company, product, or service. Advertising specialties are often used to support other forms of product promotions.

Continue reading here: Advantages and Disadvantages of Yellow Pages The Yellow Pages

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