Sales promotions are expensive to administer and can be fraught with legal complications. Sales promotions yield their most positive results when carefully integrated with the overall advertising plan.

For your individual work, read the short summary below and write a paper that answers the following questions:

Imagine you have been hired by a major American automaker to design a sales promotion campaign to stimulate sales of its newly-developed economy car, known as the Zoom.

• Identify which of the sales promotion techniques described in the chapter could be most effective and why.
• Outline what potential risks the firm takes in incorporating sales promotions into its broader IBP campaign.
• Why are sales promotions considered "risky" as an IBP tool?

In a 1-2 page essay paper,

15-8a Outdoor Signage and Billboard Advertising

Billboards, posters, and outdoor signs are perhaps the oldest forms of advertising. Posters first appeared in North America not as promotional pieces, but rather were used during the Revolutionary War to keep the civilian population informed about the war's status. In the 1800s, they became a promotional tool, with circuses and politicians among the first to adopt this new medium. Today, the creative challenge posed by outdoor advertising is as it has always been-to grab attention and communicate with minimal verbiage and striking imagery.

In recent years, total spending on outdoor advertising in the United States has actually been increasing fairly steadily and now stands at about $8 billion per year.²⁴ Outdoor advertising offers several distinct advantages. This medium provides an excellent means to achieve wide exposure for a message and a brand in specific local markets. Size of the display is a powerful attraction of this medium, especially when combined with special lighting and moving features. Billboards can be captivating when clever creative is conceived for the board to highlight the brand or company name. Billboards created for a retail store in Minneapolis have even wafted a mint scent throughout the city as part of a candy promotion for Valentine's Day. Billboards also offer around-the-clock exposure for an advertiser's message and are well suited to showing off a brand's distinctive packaging or logo.

Billboards are especially effective when they reach viewers with a message that speaks to a need or desire that is immediately relevant. For instance, we all know that billboards are commonly deployed by fast-food restaurants along major freeways to help hungry travelers know where to exit to enjoy a Whopper or Big Mac.Exhibit 15.16 features a clever example of putting outdoor signage in the right place at the right time to maximize its appeal. The German eyeglass company that sponsored this billboard has created a clever, entertaining, and timely communication. The product categories that rely most heavily on outdoor advertising are local services (like gas stations), real estate and insurance companies, hotels, financial institutions, and automobile dealers and services