Oh, Right, a BRANDING Ad

I have blogged before about how I feel when ad salespeople ask me if I want my ads for "branding" or if I want the person seeing it to take a specific action.

I have felt irritated. Of course I want the "ad spend" to pay off in real benefits.

Those of you with professional advertising experience chuckled, I'm sure. After all, most of my experience with advertising has been for non-profits. The nice thing about doing marketing and PR for non-profits is that publishers understand that there is little or no budget for advertising. A non-profit is not going to buy a random "branding" ad, and a publisher will still grant the non-profit coverage space. Thank you, publishers.

But publishers are like any other businesses. They have expenses, which they can meet either through ad revenue or subscription revenue. Both are in free-fall now thanks to the Internet.

Although publishers would like to maintain that wall between advertising and editorial departments, they have to keep the lights on, too. I'm sure readers would like to believe that coverage springs purely from a disinterested editor pointing out what's new and noteworthy in the market. But if it were your publication, wouldn't you want to devote space and attention to an organization that proved that it had your publication's interests at heart?

Maybe once or twice, you might allocate a little space to a new product or contact, and hope that the contact would turn into an advertiser. But over and over? Not likely.

An editor made that clear to me in an email:

TO GET COVERAGE -- PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING

We get literally hundreds of incoming e-mails DAILY from people and organizations seeking coverage.

The sad fact is, most of these submissions, no matter how good, important or legitimate, won't make it into our magazines or onto our website.

Space and time and staff are limited and we simply can't do all these submissions proper justice.

If you want to GUARANTEE coverage of your event/story, please read on.

LET'S ALL TRY A NEW, "WIN-WIN" APPROACH

If you or your clients are willing to buy ads in our magazines, we are willing to work with you to get your story properly covered. You scratch our backs, we scratch yours. The more you are willing to advertise, the more we're willing to do for you.

It's not what we want to think happens in the media, but of course it makes sense. He has bills to pay, and his readers are not paying them. Someone has to. (This particular publication was rather small and specialized, but if he came right out and said it, don't you think other publishers are thinking it?)

So I have redefined branding ads for my own purposes. A branding ad is an ad that I have no hope will ever pay off in measurable results. I take out the ad to support the publication, hoping that one day, down the line, the editor will return the favor. And because I like the fact that there are still real publications written by real journalists.

Branding ads, by the way, are more fun. I can be fanciful, without having to hammer home those pesky calls to action.