Physical Advertising is a term that describes the MEDIA which encompasses all promotional products. Physical Advertising, as a media, has unique characteristics when compared with other advertising and marketing media, such as television, radio, billboard, newspaper, magazine, direct marketing or internet. Several unique characteristics are:
- Physical Advertising is durable: It creates a stream of advertising impressions over time.
- Physical Advertising is personal: It represents a communication directly from a company to an individual…a very personal event.
- Physical Advertising is efficient: It is one-to-one…the ultimate in targeted media; no expense or energy wasted on other than specific campaign targets.
- Physical Advertising is dimensional: It has height and weight; it smells, appeals visually, can be heard, touched, and used.
Being able to talk about and define Physical Advertising as a media has several benefits, the greatest of which is it allows a promotional consultant to help a client structure an integrated, cross-media campaign with other media long before they would be in a position to select the appropriate individual products. Once the campaign objectives are well established and the most appropriate media choices have been made, the promotional consultant can guide the client to the most effective products to accomplish the campaign goals.
Promotional consultants can add value to their marketing clients by introducing the impact of Physical Advertising in combination with the media already deployed by the client. One particularly strong impact of Physical Advertising combined with traditional media is to provide ongoing advertising exposure between the instant-on/instant-off exposures of traditional media. This continuity reinforces the traditional media exposures…giving the client’s investment a greater ROI than obtainable using traditional media alone.
