Brand Advertising As Creative Publicity

ABSTRACT Our view of brand advertising is that it mostly serves to publicize the advertised brand. Advertising seldom seems to persuade. Advertising in a competitive market needs to maintain the brand9s broad salience-being a brand the consumer buys or considers buying. This turns on brand awareness, but together with memory associations, familiarity, and brand assurance. Publicity can also help to develop such salience. This publicity view of advertising should affect both the briefs that are given to agencies (e.g., that cut-through is more important than having a persuasive selling proposition) and how we then evaluate the results. But since few advertisements seem actively to seek to persuade, how much do the advertisements themselves have to change, rather than just how we think and talk about them?