Brand Advertising and Response Advertising: Why They Matter

When you’re promoting your business, you can go two routes: you can tell your customers why they should do business with you, or you can tell your customers to do business with you. That’s the basic breakdown between Brand Advertising and Response Advertising. Both are important in their own ways.

To give you an idea of the value of Brand Advertising, think about your favorite soft drink. Are you thinking about The Real Thing, or It’s The Cola? Coke and Pepsi are great examples of Brand Advertising. You choose similar tasting drinks not because of what they are, but because of which ‘team’ you align yourself with. Think about the off-label brands you see in the grocery store, you can buy their cola for nearly half the price of Coke or Pepsi, but because of how you feel about Coke or Pepsi, you choose to spend the extra money.

Brand Advertising is valuable, and expensive. It can make your customers think about your business without thinking about exactly what you’ll do for them. It’s also very important in the battle between Google and Facebook:

That’s where the big-budget brand advertisers come in. Google has courted them for four years, to no avail. That’s because, while search ads are great at delivering advertising to users who are seeking specific products, they are less effective at creating demand for stuff users don’t yet know they want. Google has tried everything to lure brand advertisers—from buying and selling radio ads to purchasing YouTube. And it is easy to see why it keeps trying. Today, global online brand advertising accounts for just $50 billion a year. Offline brand advertising, meanwhile, accounts for an estimated $500 billion.

Response Advertising is more concerned with closing a sale. Or at least with getting the consumer to the point of talking to a salesperson. These ads are the ones that include some kind of Call To Action. That would be, “Come in for a Free Service,” or “Call Today” or “Visit Our Website for Coupons”. Response advertising is tied directly to the activities of your business. You can see a connection between the amount of marketing you do and the amount of business that it attracts.

Both Brand and Response advertising have a valuable place in your marketing mix. You need to know how to balance the messages that make your customer feel like doing business with you with the messages that tell your customer how to do business with you.

And that’s where AdSymetrix comes in. Our Response Measurement platform allows you to know what ads work and what ads are just wasting your time and money. We can track any response to any ad, placed anywhere. Contact AdSymetrix today to learn how we can help you.