INFLUENCE OF BILLBOARD ADVERTISING OF STUDENTS ELECTIONEERING CAMPAIGN IN FIDEI POLYTECHNIC GBOKO
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 Introduction
Advertising has grown popular as a tool of academic inquiry, a field of professional practice and an index of modern business and politics. It has come to assume the center of modern marketing and it is one of the major forms of promotion on campaign. Billboard advertising has assumed a wider and prominent position on political campaign in recent times in Nigeria. Despite electronic media, billboard advertising got campaign and election on the increase. This new discovery on campaign has not only given rise to advertising agencies, that specialized only in billboards advertising, but also a strong association of billboard advertising agencies in Nigeria which is recognized by advertisers as a subsidiary of the Advertising Practitioner Council of Nigeria (APCON). But as has been articulated by Adeyemi (1969), the constitutional provisions on freedom of expression can be said to amount only to an ordered freedom of which cannot be used as a license to spread communication that debased public morality. However, many of these ethical principles have in the course of time grown to become statutory regulation codified laws. Decree 55 of 1988 among other provisions provides that APCON show regular and control the practice of advertising in all its aspects and ramifications. It is in this immense and wide power conferred on it, that APCON developed a code of ethics to guide and regulate the practice of advertising in Nigeria.
The increase in billboard advertising underscores the effectiveness of billboard on project promotion. Billboards ensure frequent and repeated exposure to the advertisement. Billboards are usually located at points with high vehicle and human traffic. Consequently, users of such points are regularly exposed to the advertisement in the board. Secondly, billboard, also offer a high degree of locational flexibility. In other words, the boards can be placed where the advertisers actually intended them to be. In addition, they tend it has lower cost per thousand than most of the other media. They are usually more cost efficient, especially for the advertiser with a small budget. Billboard offers the advantage of very good color reproduction and at the same time it is an effective reminder medium offer serving as a catalyst for buyers who buy in impulse.
The greatest problems encountered by advertisers and their agencies with regards to billboards is site monitoring. Monitoring is usually difficult and so when posters get torn or washed out, it takes a while to discover and repots. This is because the site are usually scattered around very far geographic locations. The posters used on the board usually tedious to print and post especially when the number of sites to be covered are too many. In other words, boards make intense creative demands on the agency. Because they are usually seen in a fleeting second, they have to be powerfully executed so as to intrude on the passers-bys consciousness. In this case they tend to function better as reminder media and therefore cannot serve well as the primary and sole medium for an advertising campaign. Aside its cost efficient contributes environmental aesthetic and enduring features of landscape of towns, in the country. Although the voice of street vendor in Nigeria grows fainter with each passing year, it is still possible to hear the mournful call and tinkling bells of the old clothes and junk man, the call of the itinerant fruit peddler with his push cart, or the street corner vendors of hot chestnuts. And what will a football game be without the kids hawking peanuts and soft drinks? Much the same calls in a different language echoed in the streets.
Again if you will glance town the length of the streets in Gboko metropolis, you notice that the storekeeper around the town have taken some pains to make sure they not unobserved just as the market keepers did in the main market so you can see that broadcast advertising, point of purchase advertising, and outdoor advertising (Billboards) have all been around for a long time. but is wasn’t until the middle ages, with the world shaking advent of the printing press and moveable type, that advertising began to take the firm most familiar to as today.Winstan Fletcher (1979), identifies the following determinants of the strength of a billboard advertising, such as, the number of posters put in any given area, the size of the poster, the specific sitting of the poster and the length of the campaign. Because of the problem of the more boards in a given area, the greater the problem of dotter many local authorities regulate the citing of board as to prevent their indiscriminate location poster come in standard sizes referred to as “sheets”. The dimensions of a singly sheet are usually expressed in inches for easy handling and processing. A single limit of sheet is usually 20 inches wide by 30 inches deep. The most commonly available poster formats are 16 sheets, 32 sheets and 48 sheets.
.