Unsolicited Marketing Advice

Selective Listening Generates Targeted Message for Women's College

In the struggle to recruit students in a world of coed colleges, all-female Sweet Briar College has illustrated two key principles of any public relations effort, namely crystalizing the issue and understanding the audience. Newsweek covered the college's PR efforts as part of an article on Virgina women's colleges in its November 6, 2006 issue.

The college's new theme, "Think is for girls," is displayed in pink and targets potential students with the concept of academic excellence using today's vernacular. The concept plays out on the Web site, admissions materials, alumnae talking points, computer wallpaper and T-shirts.

Building a targeted PR campaign like Sweet Briar's requires selective listening. On one hand, the college used focus groups as a research tool to identify key traits they were seeking in potential students -- such as leadership and risk taking. Only through carefully listening to their audience -- Gen Y women -- were they able to boil their message down so succinctly. On the other hand, the staff had to avoid the common pitfall of listening to themselves instead of their customers. "When Sweet Briar first faced decling applications in the 1980s, the board of directors initally fell back on nostalgic images of a nurturing institution. It made a lot of sense to adults, but it didn''t make sense to young women who didn't feel they need nurturing," college president Elisabeth Muhlenfeld told Newsweek.

The lesson from the Sweet Briar case study is that all good public relations efforts are grounded in research, and many also need to fight upstream against the "powers that be" to translate the voice of the customer into the organization's message.

Technorati Tags: College, Public Relations

Labels: Public Relations

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 7:25 AM | Permalink | |

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Here’s a refresher on ad agency commissions and how they’re calculated.

The gist is that media like newspapers, radio and TV often provide advertising agencies a commission on the time or space they place on behalf of clients. Likewise, agencies who purchase printing or other services on behalf of their clients add a percentage as they pass the bill on to the client. These fees cover the agency’s costs of media planning or production oversight, managing the billing, “acting as the bank” on behalf of the client, and monitoring the accuracy and quality of the printing or ad insertions.

In some markets commissions have become negotiable in recent years, while other companies may make other arrangements with their agencies, such as paying for media planning expenses or print bidding services separately on a fee-basis or hourly rate and then having themselves billed directly for printing or media expenses.

When dealing with the actual figures, the key to remember is that there are two ways to view commission. The first is as a percentage of the gross amount of the bill that the client pays. Historically, the commission has been 15 percent of this amount. So if you have the total bill and multiply by .15, you’ll find the amount that is commission.

The other way to view commission is in its original or “net” amount before being “grossed up” and passed along to the client. The magic figure in this case is 17.65 percent. So if the agency has a bill, say from a printer, they will multiply that charge by .1765 and pass it along to the client for payment. Multiplying by 17.65 percent and adding it to the original amount results in a total that has 15 percent commission. In other words, 17.65 percent times net is the same as 15 percent of gross.

While 15 percent has been the traditional agency commission, some agencies may charge 20 percent or more, especially in situations where the agency is has a risk-sharing arrangement with the client. A percentage as high as 40 percent is not unheard of for printing, or costs other than media. Of course, such markups should be disclosed up front to the client as part of their contractual agreement. In fact, such disclosures, as well as the right to see actual invoices from vendors, may be mandated by law in some jurisdictions.

In reality, agencies generally use a variety of compensation models for the different services they provide to their clients. Fixed, flat-rate fees, “cost plus,” hourly rates, as well as “time and expense” approaches are common. When a commission approach is used, there may be standard, reduced or sliding scale methods that apply. Meanwhile, value-based fees are also gaining some popularity (see discussion on Comms Cafe, for example), although there has been some controversy with this approach as well.

When dealing with agency billing it’s important to remember that good creative and strategy are what initially create client-agency relationships. High costs and poor billing practices are what often sour and eventually dissolve those relationships. As in marriage, a good defense is communication between the two parties. Clients should be cautious about “nickel and diming” an agency to death, while agencies need to practice fiscal responsibility combined with integrity, along with as much transparency as possible when dealing with financial matters with a client.

Additional Resources

• Agency commission defined by UTexas Austin College of Communication
• Guidelines for Effective Advertiser/ Agency Compensation Agreements from the American Association of Advertising Agencies (PDF, 166 KB)
• Agency Remuneration by IPA (UK association of agencies) (PDF, 962 KB)
• Model Contract by European Association of Communications Agencies (EACA) discussing different types of agency remuneration (.doc file)

Technorati Tags: Advertising Agencies

Labels: Advertising Agencies

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 10:00 AM | Permalink | |

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Just as there are different writing styles for business correspondence, news releases and advertisements, there are three main styles of hedline capitalization.

1. ALL CAPITALIZED
Although once quite popular in American newspapers, all capital hedlines are rarely seen anymore. One of the reasons ALL CAPS is not used is because it is extremely hard to read, a fact that has been confirmed by experimental methods. Typists preparing copy for publication will often use ALL CAPS to indicate hedlines, subheds, or emphasis. This usage should be corrected by the professional typesetter to match the organizations preferred style for headlines, subheads or emphasis (One frequent exception among advertisers: the word FREE is often left in all caps).

2. The ‘Up’ Style
The so-called "Up" style (not to be confused with the "all up" style of total capitalization described in #1) is an approach that capitalizes every word except articles ("a," "an," and "the"), conjunctions ("and," "or," and "but" ), and most prepositions. The “to” in infinitive phrases is lowercased while in hyphenated compounds, the second and subsequent elements are generally capitalized. Finally, the first and last words of the hedline (or deck) are always capitalized. This style is fairly similar to how book titles are generally handled. The Up style is a popular newspaper and newsletter style although the "down" style is becoming more common, especially for newspapers. It has the advantage of being fairly easy to communicate to secretaries and staff in a business setting, largely because businesses styles commonly use more capitalization than is found in current publication styles.

3. The ‘down’ style
This is becoming a more common headline format for modern newspapers. In addition, the Associated Press now favors this approach for the material it transmits. This style capitalizes only proper nouns and the first word in the headline. It is the most easy to read, and most resembles the natural capitalization used in sentences.

The hedline style you select for your organization is a matter of choice. However, once selected, it should be applied as consistently as possible for a uniform and professional appearance across publications.

Additional Resources

• Wikipedia Identifies Nine Major Capitalization Styles
• EGGads! Capital Headline Mistakes from Web Reference
• Sun Microsystem’s Headline and Sentence Capitalization Guide
• Label capitalization information from the Human-Computer Interaction Resource Network
• How to Break Headline Decks

Technorati Tags: Copy Writing, Headline

Labels: Copy Writing

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 7:15 AM | Permalink | |

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