Advertising plan

ADVERTISING PLAN PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This project will give you an opportunity to act as an Account Planner at a big and successful ad
agency. You will choose a brand with a problem to analyze and develop an “Advertising Plan” for
it. The insights that you will provide in this Ad Plan as an Account Planner will be used by your
advertising agency’s Creative Team who will in turn produce impactful and successful ads.

Outline

I. Goal
Identifying the problem of the brand and setting an objective to solve that problem is the most
important step.

A. Understanding the Key Fact

What is the problem with this brand? Though there may be several key facts, you should
only expect your advertising to tackle one problem.

B. Advertising Objective

Based on the Key Fact above, it’s important to make sure that advertising can potentially
solve your client’s problem. All the advertising in the world cannot make a bad product
better, but advertising can create awareness, change attitudes, motivate purchase, etc. You
must be very clear about exactly what you’re hoping to accomplish with your advertising
campaign: One single advertising objective.

II. Overview
This step involves extensive information gathering about the target market, competitors, and
the marketplace trends in general.

A. Brand Research

This step involves a brand audit and you will mainly use secondary data. This brand audit

will include:

• A SWOT analysis of the brand (in bullet points)
• an environmental analysis of the marketplace (what’s going on in the marketplace, market
  share, trends, main competitors, etc…)
  B. Audience Research
  This will be the part where you will collect data. Regarding the target audience research,
  target member descriptions should include not only demographic and geographic
  information (age, geographic area, education levels, socioeconomic group, etc.), but
  psychographic information such as lifestyles, attitudes, and values as well (e.g., what they’re
  like, their likes and dislikes, their perspective on life, how they envision themselves, how the
  product fits with all of this, etc). In the end you must also create a description a profile of an
  imaginary member of your target audience that will bring this individual alive for your
  Creative Team. In addition to the detailed info on people as part of your target audience, you will also reveal how the brand is currently perceived by the existing target audience. (All of
  the information about your target audience will help creative team to produce the ads)

III. Strategy
The single most compelling benefit.

Based on the insights about your audience, you need to decide on the most compelling idea
to be used and brought into life by the creative team. Now you know your target consumer’s
thoughts, feelings and behaviors toward your product/product category, what could be the
single most important benefit you can offer to them that will change their attitude, increase
their awareness, motivate them to buy the product, etc… (depending on which one you
choose as your objective at the beginning).

• To be effective, the benefit must be believable to the consumer, and relevant to his or her
  needs, wants and experience.
• This idea also must somehow differentiate your brand from the competition.
  WRITING GUIDELINES
  • (1) 7 pages max, double-space, with 1” margins.
  • (2) Include all extra materials (graphs, figures, tables, all kinds of data you used, etc) in the
    appendix. Those pages do not count as part of the 7-page limit.
  • (3) Plagiarism will have serious consequences.
    (4) Properly cite your references within text. Follow APA guidelines for the references list.
    (5) Make sure to spell-check and correct grammatical mistakes before submitting your report.
    (6) Name your presentation file with the brand you worked on.
    (7) You don’t need to create a new format. Just follow the one provided in the description above.
    Just provide the info that is asked from you. At the end make sure everything is coherent.