'Invest in advertising'

Joel Nettey, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Innova DDB, an advertising company, has stressed the need for companies to invest in the advertisement of their products and services.

Integrated marketing is not just putting across information about a product or service to an audience through the media but offering specialized services like public relations, event management or marketing research for clients, he noted.

According to him, advertising is the surest way to market products and services to a target audience.

“In business, you are working and producing goods. You have something that you want the world out there to be aware of. The way to get people to know about it, just the knowledge about your product is to advertise but beyond that you want people to know the particular benefits of your products or services, this is achieved by building a concerted marketing effort and it takes dedicated focused marketing,” he said.

That, according to him, is important because consumers have limited finances to make a choice to benefit them.

“There are some people who look for one-stop solution but I think the more predominant is getting a specialist company to do a specific thing for various reasons. We want a company that has specialty in media buying or creative solution so the shift is rather towards company looking for specialist units to tackle particular parts of the marketing communications needs. So yes there is still space for us but gradually people are beginning to move to more specialized agencies.

He therefore encouraged young businesses and advertisers to sustain their efforts despite economic difficulties.