Jenni Romaniuk: Three areas where ads frequently fail

Jenni Romaniuk, from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science, outlines three areas where advertising is most likely to fail. (This is an excerpt from a longer Opinion piece. Click "View more" to read the full article.)

For advertising to work and freshen brand memories and, in turn, help brands grow, a number of pieces need to be in place. This machine can break down in a number of places and failure means advertising either doesn’t work or its effects on buyer memory do not translate into sales. Here are three fails to fix to help advertising to work more often:

• Failure to reach – for brands to grow they need to reach out to as many category buyers’ brains as possible. The podcast highlights the challenges with digital advertising not delivering the reach it promised, and (lack of) viewability statistics should give marketers pause. But often reach failure happens before that, at the planning stage, where marketers don’t plan for reach in the first place. It also happens after that, at the creative stage where the plan might be in place, but the creative just doesn’t get any attention. For advertising to work, we need to fix these advertising distribution issues of planning, delivering, noticing, failures in reach.
• Failure to brand – the brand name anchors the exposure in the right part of memory, without the brand, any noticed ad is a creative endeavour with little useful ROI. Much of the paid for reach is wasted because it failed to brand. Whether via the brand name or distinctive assets, we need to get better at branding in every media environment so advertising can work for the brand.
• Failure to be buyable – the best advertising in the world doesn’t translate into sales if physical availability is lacking, and the brand is not easy to find and buy. Presence in as many channels/retailers as possible is a start, but you need the prominence to be found in competitive clutter, and a portfolio item suitable for that buying occasion.