424 The Marketing Book
for regarding the programme as having an
unacceptable marketing purpose.
(Independent Television Commission,
1998, paragraphs 5 and 17.2)Where radio advertising is concerned, the
relevant code requires that:
Licensees must ensure that the distinction
between advertising and programming is not
blurred and that listeners are not confused
between the two. Legitimate objective coverage
of a commercial product or service in editorial
is acceptable (but see also... Product
Placement).
(Radio Authority, 2001, Section 2, Rule 1)Above and below the line
Traditionally, marketing practitioners have dis-
tinguished promotional methods as being
either ‘above the line’ or ‘below the line’.
Advertising lies above and every other ingre-
dient of the promotional mix below – except
personal selling, which is not normally
assigned to either category. This purely hypo-
thetical boundary, first delineated in 1954 by
Procter & Gamble, is based on the fact that
advertising agencies are paid for their work in
a completely different way from the inter-
mediaries who provide every other form of
promotional service. The details follow later in
this chapter. The point for the moment is that its
relevance to promotional strategy is therefore
highly suspect.
Given the semantic loading of ‘above’ and
‘below’ in everyday speech, outsiders might be
forgiven for assuming that advertising is some-
how superior to all the other ingredients of the
mix. Indeed, it is easy to observe this lazy
assumption being made in practice, the origi-
nators of the ‘line’ themselves, for example,
being still massive spenders on media advertis-
ing, apparently in preference to other means to
the same end. Yet this chapter has already
provided ample evidence that advertising is
not in fact strategically superior to the rest in
any general, systematic way.
Those who perpetuate the dichotomy will
argue that advertising is ‘remote’ from the
audience and therefore unlikely to be able to
clinch the sale, whereas below-the-line tech-
niques are ‘direct’ and quite capable of doing
so, and will extend the logic to propose that
short-term brand-winning can be achieved
below the line but long-term brand building
demands sustained above-the-line activity.
They also argue that the effect of below-the-
line campaigns is more easily measured and
tracked over time. These are reasonable argu-
ments as far as they go, but have to be
qualified by conditions and exclusions in prac-
tice. For instance, direct-response advertising
(above) is by definition ‘direct’, but sponsor-
ship (below) is ‘remote’. With respect to the
measurability criterion, users of sponsorship
have so far been notoriously unwilling to
make the effort at all, whereas most adver-
tisers (above) at least try, in the face of
considerable technical difficulties.
In general, the above/below boundary is
being blurred by the rapid growth of Internet
advertising, the proliferation of dot.com direct
merchants and the arrival of interactive
television.
Meanwhile, Table 17.1 shows that advertis-
ing continues to dominate the UK promotional
mix. A steady, small decline in the amount
spent on buying space and time in conventional
media has been compensated for over the four-
year period by a very steep increase in expendi-
ture in the ‘new media’, though that remains
for the time being a very modest amount in real
terms. This share of the mix held by this sole
above-the-line ingredient is not far short of half
the total UK promotional expenditure, and only
seven percentage points less than that held by
the two largest below-the-line ingredients in
combination. Two of the other three have been
losing share, and they collectively represented
only just over 5 per cent of the grand total in- There is thus no evidence whatever for
the widely held belief that marketers are
steadily shifting their money from above to
below the line.