by Eugene Vasconi, owner of Communication Arts and author of "Say What?  Do You Know What You Are Communicating"

Let me give you a political answer to this question.  Yes...and no.

There are five considerations when planning to advertise.  These come from my book “Say What?” and I call them the FIVE KNOWS.

Briefly, you must consider:

1. Your target or who you want to communicate to.
2. What you want to communicate as a simple, single concept.
3. How long you have to get the message across.
4. The vehicle of communication and its drawbacks.
5. Your budget (time, energy, consumables, etc.)

These five items help you maximize the construction of your message and they are essential to making an impact.  But there is one more consideration that will help you not lose money when you do advertise.  It is considering the “appropriateness” of your advertising.

This does not mean determing if your message is PG rated or anything content related.  This means that you need to think about if your message content is a good fit for the way you wish to present it.

For example, say you own a very fine restaurant and want to advertise on a billboard.  There are several content issues to consider in addition to the FIVE KNOWS.  One issue is that your intended clients may not be billboard oriented.  If you place your fine restaurant on a sign near a fast food ad, you will be lumped in the same category.  Not what you wish.  In this case, it would be much better to advertise in a fine magazine or fine food oriented web site.  That is where your clients will be receptive.

Another example would be placing an ad on a radio station.  In addition to insuring that the ad runs within a show that reflects the interests of the customers you intend to reach, you must be certain that the content makes sense.  If you still own that fine restaurant, your goal would be to promote the quality of the setting, the quality of food items, and the idea of dining with others of high taste.  You do not want to promote the $4.99 fish special with frys and cole slaw.  And the music must be quality and not some (c)rap background.

Newspaper advertising has always been a real challenge and is even more so now with the huge penetration of the internet.  But, newspapers can be effective advertising vehicles if you know some tricks of the medium. 

First, unless you are selling a boat trailer or something like it, forget the classifieds for business advertising.  An exception would be if you simply must list a lot of stuff...then it is cost effective.

The whole game with newspaper advertising is placement.  Your ad can easily get buried and, depending on how much you are spending, you can request placement on the page.  Always try for a corner and preferably bottom left or right.  Don’t be cheap on the size and hire someone to design it – your freshman in design school nephew is not the person.  Invest in the ad and it will bring you back rewards.

As you are still the fine restaurant owner, you need to advertise one concept in your newspaper ad...the setting.  That also includes the type of exquisite cuisine you provide.  Hire a professional photographer to take a great photo of your dining area and base your ad off of that.  A simple line like “Fine dining in a Tuscan theme” tells a lot.  Make it simple with not too much text which will get ignored anyway.

In conclusion, you can waste a lot of money on any form of advertising if you do not understand what you are doing.  Some businesses just don’t do well with certain types of advertising while others can utilize nearly anything.  Just the way it is.  A good tip is to look around at your competition.  See what they do and if they are successful, emulate it with your own style. 

Just don’t spend a lot of money to run an ad for something and spend half of the ad making disclaimers as to why you should be careful when using you product.  Too many lawyers involved in this one and it is simply bad advertising to do it.

When in doubt, ask a pro...but not a pro who makes a commission based on if he can convince you to go a particular way.

Good luck,

Gene Vasconi