By Jay Bemis | Advertising Systems Inc.
We often talk in this space about advertisers and marketers as if they’re one and the same industry. True, they do work together to get a brand’s messages disseminated to the public. But, take note: An advertiser and a marketer each brings certain responsibilities to a conference-room table that are separate and unique — yet designed for the two sides to work seamlessly together.
Their chief goal? To present a successful ad campaign to their brand’s potential customers.
Their relationship recently was defined thusly from the folks at eMarketer:
“Marketing and advertising is about communication and influence and span a variety of practices aimed at promoting products, services and brands to specific target audiences. With the evolution of digital technologies, this industry has transformed, expanding tactics, platforms and methodologies to engage consumers.”
Advertisers are the ones who bring money from budgets to the table and want to ensure their dollars are wisely spent.
“Advertising is a specific part of marketing focused on spreading the word about products, services or brands through paid channels,” eMarketer notes. “It’s designed to inform the audience about what’s being offered, using various media to influence perceptions and encourage purchases”
The marketer’s role, meanwhile, is to form a plan that will help steer the advertiser, indeed, down a path that will ensure that the brand’s budget is wisely spent and its campaign gains much customer attention.
“Marketing encompasses identifying customer needs, creating products that satisfy those (needs), setting the right prices, making products available, and promoting them effectively,” eMarketer says. “The goal is to build lasting customer relationships.”
Comparing the Roles in This Little Relationship
When comparing the marketing and advertising roles in working on an ad campaign, think of the tools that marketing uses, such as market research, branding and sales strategies, while the chief item within advertising’s toolbox centers on creating and placing compelling messages on a range of advertising channels.
Marketing’s objective is to satisfy customer needs and build lasting relationships. Advertising, meanwhile, aims to generate interest and encourage buying decisions.
Marketing or advertising can both be handled in-house, but many brands prefer to hire an outside agency to run campaigns or their entire marketing functions.
Businesses find these outside marketing and advertising agencies to be essential for their brands, because the agencies offer the expertise and digital tools to run an ad campaign. These marketing specialists assist brands with such key strategies as SEO and social media and tackling any industry challenges that may arise, such as ad blocking, media fragmentation and privacy concerns.
Marketers Stay on Top of Current Trends
Marketing specialists also stay on top of current trends, such as knowing that US advertising and marketing spending will grow 10.7% in 2024, per a recent study by marketing analysis research firm Winterberry Group.
We often report on these key trends here, but eMarketer updates us the current state of some of them:
- Accelerated Digital Transformation: As many advertisers and marketers know, marketing has been going digital for years, with search engines and social media capturing more consumer attention and traditional TV shifting to streaming. Advances in artificial intelligence are speeding up the transformation. Generative AI tools promise faster and easier advertising and personalized content, potentially changing consumer engagement with experiences.
- Major Shifts in Data Practices: Customer distaste for invasive data and targeting practices have led to data regulations and policy changes from major tech companies, such as Apple’s changes to app-based tracking and email analytics and Google’s sunsetting of 3rd-party browser cookies (now planned for some time in 2025). Both actions will change how marketers target customers on the open web.
- Customer Demand for Omnichannel, Always-On Strategies: Today’s consumer wants friction-free experiences across physical, digital and mobile platforms. For marketers and advertisers, that means coordinating campaigns across search, social media and retail media, and integrating experiences through text, longform and shortform video, playable game ads and more.
- Ad channel disruption: Google’s digital dominance is being challenged. Amazon has carved out a massive ad business for product search, and other retail media networks are gaining share. Gen Z is turning to platforms like TikTok for search, the creator economy is driving more purchases, Meta and its X rival Threads are now trending, and generative AI search experiences are creating opportunities for new search platforms.
- Streaming’s Ad-Supported TV Takeover: The future of streaming is ad-supported, giving advertisers new options for video marketing and advertising. As more consumers opt for ad-supported plans, costs per impression (CPMs) for streaming ads are dropping, making the channel more attractive. And, connected TV, as we’ve reported here, continues to grow as an ad-campaign option.
- AI’s Rapid Ascent: The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 triggered an AI race that will transform marketing and advertising. (Just in August, ChatGPT joined the top 10 most-downloaded apps in the world lists.)
Use cases for AI, such as chatbots, generative search and scaled content generation, directly affect consumer experiences, while AI-enhanced functions, such as data analysis, coding and ad optimization, could create even more efficient techniques for marketing and advertising professionals.
Marketers are trying to balance all this AI promise with any pitfalls, “as issues around accuracy, copyright and data privacy with AI models still need to be solved,” as eMarketer notes, cautiously.
