Is Advertising Marketing?
I never had any formal training in marketing so I've had to pick up what I know about it on the streets. Ever the dutiful student, I can now say with confidence, "Marketing consists of all those activities, enshrined in the 4 P's, required to bring a product to market." When I was young, however, like many people, I would have said, "Marketing is advertising."
Of course, the confusion of marketing with advertising is an honest mistake and one not discouraged by the ad industry itself. Consider the recent WSJ article, U.K. Ad Shops Prowl New Avenues
[registration required - M.]. Given the startling news that the UK Media Market should shrink by .6% next year (compared to the modest 2.3% growth in the U.S. or the whopping 14.1% growth in China), and that Google's UK ad revenue will exceed that of Channel Four television by #100 million, ad agencies across the pond are seeking new sources of revenue. Some are moving into ancillary businesses such as music licensing. Others are venturing deeper into "creative" fields such as television production, editing, and 3-D graphic creation. And others are moving into, well, marketing.
On the one hand, you have Publicis Worldwide, a unit of Publicis Groupe, which has hired a group focused on supermarket products that will " design labels, advise on pricing and negotiate with supermarkets over shelf space," thus taking on 3 of the 4 P's - Price, Place, and Promotion (for the sake of argument, I'm subsuming "packaging" under the latter). On the other hand, we find M&C Saatchi going whole hog on the first P - "Product" - by "creating luxury goods and targeting markets for them."
Saatchi's chief executive, David Kershaw, puts it rather succinctly: The earlier an agency gets involved with a product, the more revenue it's likely to generate. This is undoubtedly true for, if an "ad" agency is developing products, determining prices, managing placement, and running promotional campaigns (sometimes known as "advertising"), then it is in effect a company bringing something to market - a tried and true method for generating revenue!
These business strategies make sense because the basic skills that create successful advertising - defining value propositions, identifying target audiences, crafting and delivering messages that motivate them to act, etc. - can readily be applied all the way up the marketing stream. But if agencies follow the logic of this insight, as they seem to be, what's to stop their clients from doing the same, though in reverse? At worst, clients may begin to view agencies as competitors. At best, they may ask themselves, "If an ad agency is basically replicating my marketing organization, why do I need them again?"
