On Advertising

Quotes from books and the internet on advertising;

“To establish an advertising budget Dr Simon Broadbent suggests asking the following four questions: What can the product afford? What is the advertising task? What are competitors spending? What have we learnt from previous years?”

(The fundamentals of Advertising by John Wilmshurst and Adrian Mackay)

                Obviously the last question doesn’t apply to us as this is the first time were doing this. Dr Broadbent suggested these questions for people who need to know the amount of money they can spend on advertising compared to the amount of money they will receive back in profit and helps to understand how much should be spent on advertising. In our case we are getting a fixed some of the counsel as it is a non profit exhibition. This means that all we have to do is work out the budget we have and then decide how much of that will go on advertising. There fore the first question doesn’t apply to us too much either. The second question in our case would be that we are going to send out advertisements in various different public places such as gallery’s and studios. This area will be covered more in the financial side of this project and it will look at how much we can afford to spend on advertising in these places. The third question in our case would question what other artists have spent on previous exhibitions on advertising.

“The early promotion of a general concept of a whole new type of product is often referred to as ‘generic’ promotion, whereas the later competing for share of an established market is called ‘differentiation’.”

(The fundamentals of Advertising by John Wilmshurst and Adrian Mackay)

                The advertisement for our exhibition could be described as having some of both of these qualities. For one, our exhibition is a fairly new concept that not many artists/curators have ever done before. Making the advertisement for it a generic promotion as it’s a whole new type of exhibition. However on the other hand it is just another art exhibition which many, many other people have provided advertisements for in the past making it a differentiation promotion.

                In the same book there is a page where it explains advertisement strategies. “Advertising strategies considerations include the various ways in which a market can be expanded”. It goes on to list ways in which markets can expand their users, uses or choice. It quotes “You can increase product choice (e.g. confectionary manufacturers such as Mars introduced ice-creams based on their original brands.)” We have done a similar thing with our exhibition. Although the quote and our exhibition are obviously based on completely different things, they are similar. This is because with our exhibition, instead of keeping the same old exhibition that people put on all the time, we have tried to increase the choice of art. We have put things into our exhibition that not many other exhibitions would have. An example of this is the ‘hands on’ room downstairs which is a fairly unique style of exhibition.

Funding research (done)
proposal and rational (done)
advertising
drawings/diagrams (nearly)
leaflet
photoshopped image (done?)
(group cv)