How do you like your stake? Media rare?

Call it what you like, but advertising is an investment. It’s your biggest juiciest stake in your business and how you treat it may easily decide the fate of your organisation.

Like the real thing, the success of your stake, depends on how you marinate it, season it, cook it, and serve it. And if it fails to deliver, then you have to carefully look at what went wrong and take a good hard look at the chef.

All too often advertising is considered a failure because it disappoints relative to expectations and that can be a problem on its own. If we carry the steak illustration a little further I think we’d all agree you can’t expect to get a great barbecue feed out of chuck steak, so ingredients are important. Imagine missing an ingredient, or worse using it incorrectly.

Sad to say, the advertising failures I’ve seen have two very specific and common issues. The first is content, in other words, the ingredients are wrong and served incorrectly and so the ad fails to meet expectation; the second issue is that almost every failure is “Media Rare” – that is to say the media is badly thought through, reactive, poorly funded and it’s price which dictates the buy.

So here’s a few basic media buying rules:

If you want scotch fillet you won’t get it by buying some other cut.

Make certain you know what you want to achieve and then buy the right ingredient to make it successful. Examine what’s available and think about what each media actually does, how people respond to it and how far does it reach?

Cost is relative to success – the best cuts make the best taste. If you buy cheap media you’ll get cheap results – what works best, costs more. As an example, cheap television is cheap because it has less viewers and there’s more of it. So you’ll finish up with less awareness and the results will be relative.

Beware of disguises. What looks good on the outside, may not be so good after all.

Radio is not a replacement for TV; Yellow Pages is not a replacement for web; press is not a replacement for direct mail and it goes on. Each have their specific task and it’s your job to recognise what they do.

And if you don’t understand it all , then why not call in your very own chef? Someone who knows how to cook up a real advertising campaign. Perhaps the best part where media is concerned is that you don’t always need to pay someone to do it. Our media team has the expertise and the know how to advise you and book your media free, that’s right completely free of charge.

So you don’t have to be ‘media rare’ call us and get yourself a real good feed for free. 9751 1122 and ask me personally.