Advertising Gives Businesses Control

By Bob Felten
Vice President of AAF Reno

Associate Professor of Strategic Communications
Reynolds School of Journalism
University of Nevada, Reno

Admit it. You are a bit of a control freak. You want more control all the time. This is particularly true when it comes to your business.

Paid advertising is all about control. This is a simple truth often lost in conversations about marketing particularly social media marketing. Control is one of the major benefits of paid advertising. You buy control.

You don’t have to worry that a reporter or editor will mangle your message.

You don’t have to depend on someone else “sharing” your message and perhaps adding a negative commentary.

And you shouldn’t have to worry about wasting money putting messages in front of a lot of people who will never be your customers.

With advertising, you control the development of your message. That TV commercial, that newspaper ad, that radio spot, yes even that social media ad will all run just as you want them to; just as you saw or heard them before anyone else did.

With advertising, you control who will see, read or hear your message. Doing this well, also helps to controls costs. The TV commercial runs in the show selected. The newspaper ad runs on the day scheduled. You hear the radio ad as you drive to work, just as planned. The social media ad is seen by just the people you want to reach.

As a business owner, you can do both of these things better when you have the help of professionals.

We have extraordinarily talented professionals here who are skilled at creating messages – advertising – to achieve the response you want.

We have extraordinarily smart media planners and buyers here to help you place advertising cost effectively so your message reaches a high percentage of your audience at the lowest cost. New and amazing technologies help this process.

Many people believe so called word-of-mouth “advertising” is most effective. It serves as a third-party endorsement of your business. Yet such messages frequently have inaccurate information. Play a word-of-mouth game sometime. Get some friends in a circle and whisper a key sales point about your business in the ear of the person right next to you. Listen to how that message sounds when it has passed from person to person around the circle. It will rarely if ever be similar to the message you started. The more people in the circle, the more distorted the message becomes. This does not happen when you buy advertising.

Need, want, demand more control? Paid advertising gives it to you. Your business will be better for it. You probably will too.