Understanding advertising from the client’s perspective with Diana Birba.
Diana Birba is a “marketing professional with many years of Marketing experience and Consumer Insights, with a proven track record of successful NPDs, campaign launches, and numerous marketing and commercial distinctions. She has been “teaching voluntarily “Marketing theory in practice”, as a business instructor at Panteion AD & PR Lab (Dept. of Communication, Media and Culture), during winter semesters”. She has worked for various companies. She has been a Brand Manager for Sarantis Group, she has been Senior Product Manager and Marketing & Trade Manager for Cadbury, and Marketing Manager, and Marketing Manager G&C for Mondelez.
As of today, she is the Marketing Manager for Coca-Cola Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. She is a true professional and very dedicated to her work. She is always to the point and is in touch with the market’s needs at all times. Her point of view was very precious for this research because she gave us the chance to understand the advertiser’s perspective, on how a company sees advertisement placement. The company’s perspective always differs from the one of an advertising agency. So we got to get a glimpse of both sides.
Note: This interview was taken in 2019 in the context of a Bachelor thesis on Media Placement & Advertisement under the auspices of Panteion University. The participants had agreed for their names to be public in the qualitative part of the research.
Question No. 1: What are the criteria that an advertisement-advertising campaign is created today?
I will answer to these questions from the client’s standpoint which is different from someone working in an advertising agency.
For a company to decide on doing an advertising campaign, the company has a business goal that needs to be achieved. For this business goal, the advertising campaign KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are needed to be established. Is it desirable to achieve penetration, frequency, sales, consumption, a new product, a new service, or an activation? Depending on what you want to achieve as a business, things change. You might want to create awareness, induce product trials, or call to action. A communication plan, and not an advertisement, is built upon a strategy through which these business objectives are translated into communication objectives. There should be a clear look at success, what needs to be achieved, and be definite as to when these goals are considered achieved.
When an advertising agency receives the communication objectives, it begins to build an advertising strategy. The agency has to think of the way it is going to appeal to the chosen target group. When it comes to the older generation, traditional media are chosen. You use a different media mix when you want to appeal to younger generations. When this consumer profiling is done, it is very needed to find the consumer’s touch-points and create a connection plan.
Question No. 2: What is it that a user requires from a medium, to be completely satisfied with it?
Everything should be consumer-oriented. The message receivers, to be satisfied, have to be offered relevant content in the right context.
Question No. 3: What opinion do you believe that people have for traditional media?
Traditional media are very important here in Greece. We cannot discard them from our strategy just because the digital world is evolving. In fact, I have observed a simultaneous media consumption of both traditional and digital media. Research has shown that seven out of ten young people still watch television every day. She adds that research has also shown that ten out of ten young people visit the Internet every day.
She believes that without the classic radio, everything would be chaotic because this is where we hear many new songs and then we search to find them on YouTube to listen to them again. YouTube is one of the biggest search engines in Greece right now. If someone sees the most viewed videos on YouTube, those would be videos that are linked to content from traditional media such as television shows. She is very adamant about this interrelation-interconnection.
Question No. 4: What opinion do you think people have for new media?
New media are serving the purpose, for a big part, to watch again or navigate through content that is related to the content produced by traditional media. New media on their own are very chaotic.
Question No 5: What opinion do you have on integrated communication campaigns?
I believe that through different touch-points you can find your target group at the right time and give them the right information. There are very effective ways of communicating something without irritating and without getting the target audience annoyed, if the campaign is executed correctly.
Question No. 6: Apart from the efficient media placement of an advertisement, what role does advertisement content play in advertising efficiency?
Content is extremely important and is above all. If you do not have the content you are not going to catch your target group’s attention even if you are paying all the right media to promote it.
Question No. 7: Do you believe in the power of advertising content over efficient media placement?
If a message is very strong and solid it is not impossible to be transmitted from mouth to mouth. But those kinds of ideas are one in a million. She Those “big ideas” do exist and there are many examples that became viral organically for the most part. However, assistance is always needed from the media for the message to be transmitted to the right audience faster.
Question No. 8: When can an advertiser be sure that his/her idea is going to be efficient?
You can never really be 100% sure.
