THE EFFECT OF BILLBOARD ADVERTISING IN PRODUCT PROMOTION
CHAPTER ONE
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Advertising has grown increasingly popular as an object of academic inquiry, a field of professional practice and an index of modern business. It has come to assume the centre of modern marketing and it is one of the major forms of promotion in product and service marketing. Billboard advertising has assumed a wider and prominent position in product promotion in recent times in Nigeria. Despite electronic media, billboard advertising got product promotion on the increase.
This new discovery in product promotion has not only given rise to advertising agencies that specialized only in billboard advertising, and also a strong association of billboard advertising 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 provision 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 exercise of 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 evidence increase in billboard advertising under sources the effectiveness of billboard in project promotion. Billboards ensure frequent and repeated exposure to the advertisement. Billboards are usually located at points with higher vehicular 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 that 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 colour reproduction and at the same time it is an effective reminder medium offer servicing as a catalyst for buyer who buy io impulse. The greatest problems encountered by advertisers and their agencies with regard to billboard are site monitoring. Monitoring is usually difficult and so when posters get torn or washed out, it takes a while to discover and repost. This is because the sites are usually scattered around very far geographical locations.
The posters used on the boards are usually tedious to print and post especially when the number of sites to be covered are too many. In other 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-by’s 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 to environmental aesthetic and enduring feature of landscape of towns, in the country. Although the voice of the street vendor in Nigeria grows fainter with each passing year, it is still possible to hear the mournful call and tinkling bell of the old clothes and junk man, the call of the itinerant fruit peddler with his pushcart, or the street corner vendor of hot chestnuts. And what will a football game be without the kids hawking peanut and soft drinks? Much the same call in a different language, echoed in the street.
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