Advertising

The American Marketing Association defines advertising as the paid, non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods and services by an identified sponsor. Four words carry the whole field: paid (someone paid and wants a result), non-personal (it speaks to the masses, so it needs media), presentation (a product, a service, an idea, an event) and identified sponsor (someone is accountable for it). Advertising informs, persuades and reminds. It can be commercial (to sell) or institutional (the brand of a company or a country, a campaign for a good cause).

Students often confuse advertising with marketing. Advertising is just one tool in the communication mix, alongside PR, sales promotion, personal selling, direct marketing and events; it’s only the most visible one. Where there is infrastructure, there is advertising: print, radio, television, search engines, social networks and now AI; every technology brought a new format.

And how many ads do we see a day? The famous 5,000 a day comes from a 2005 book by J. Walker Smith, where he merely listed marketers’ growing estimates (500, 2,000, 5,000) to illustrate saturation; journalists turned it into a measurement. In 2024, Smith himself wrote that the ads that really break through number fewer than 100 a day. In 2014, Media Dynamics counted roughly 360 ad exposures a day for an adult American, of which they notice 150 to 155; the often-quoted 12 remembered is just an estimate from the SJ Insights blog. For comparison: 5,000 ads over 16 waking hours is one every 11 seconds; 360 exposures is roughly one in just under three minutes.

There’s a lot of money in it. According to WARC, global ad spend reached $1.19 trillion in 2025; the market had already crossed the trillion-dollar mark in 2024. In December 2024, GroupM expected only $1.1 trillion for 2025: that is a forecast made in advance set against a later estimate of the actual figure, and every agency calculates the market a little differently. According to the Association of Communication Agencies (AKA), the Czech market was worth CZK 150.2 billion in net investment in 2024, roughly CZK 13,800 for each of the 10.9 million inhabitants, infants included.

Advertising without an objective is just a pretty picture. By objective, we distinguish three kinds. Brand advertising builds identity and memory (Adidas: Impossible is Nothing). Direct response advertising wants immediate action: buy, sign up, call (the countdown to Amazon Prime Day). Public interest advertising promotes a social cause (FIFA’s campaigns against racism). The objective should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound): the sample “the club will increase Instagram engagement by 30% in six months” is an objective; “we want to be more visible” is not.

The objective doesn’t come out of nowhere. Strategy has layers: corporate strategy sets where the company is going, marketing strategy what it sells and to whom, communication strategy what it says about it, and only then do advertising and the campaign plan decide how it says it. When a logistics company wants more customers for its warehouses, the advertising objective is “50 inquiries from companies with more than 200 employees by the end of the quarter”, not “a LinkedIn campaign”. The campaign is a means.

The customer journey is described by the AIDA(S) model, which you know from the Marketing lesson. For advertising, the main takeaway is that each stage has its own key performance indicators, or KPIs: the numbers that tell you whether you’ve succeeded (see the list below). Psychology distinguishes three stages of response: cognitive (I see a billboard), affective (nostalgia in a Coca-Cola ad) and conative (I click “Buy”).

How do you split the money between brand and sales? The starting point is the 60:40 ratio from Les Binet and Peter Field: roughly 60% of the budget for long-term brand building, 40% for short-term sales activation (where the data came from and how it has shifted is covered in the Brand lesson). For campaign planning, the main lesson is this: don’t put everything into performance advertising just because it’s easy to measure.

An advertising campaign is a series of advertising messages that share a single idea and theme. It is one part of integrated marketing communication (IMC): a planning approach that coordinates all the tools of the communication mix and all touchpoints so that the customer gets one consistent message. That is how the American Association of Advertising Agencies described it in 1989, and Don Schultz, Stanley Tannenbaum and Robert Lauterborn developed it in 1993. The emphasis is on the word integrated: the customer should get the same story in the same voice on LinkedIn, in email, at a trade fair and on the website; when the channels drift apart, the money is wasted twice.

In military terms, we can shoot in three ways. Area fire: television, radio, billboards; big reach, low precision, and you pay even for people who will never need you; it makes sense for a product for everyone (beer, a phone plan, elections). From the trenches: content, SEO, newsletter, community; positions that hold for years and are cheap per unit, but for the first few months you see nothing. Targeted: search by intent, retargeting (ads for people who have already been to your website), LinkedIn by job title; expensive per contact, but precise. Campaign strategy means choosing the mix of these three, not picking one.

Planning a communication strategy has seven steps: objectives, audience, channels, messages, content plan, implementation and monitoring, evaluation and adaptation; the loop closes back at the objectives. An alternative to the funnel is the flywheel: the UFC invests in fighters, they put on attractive fights, the fights draw viewers and the media, popularity brings in sponsors and broadcast rights, and the revenue goes back into new fighters. Advertising spins the wheel; it doesn’t fill the funnel just once.

The basic split is push vs. pull. Push pushes the message to people who aren’t looking for it right now: a commercial, a billboard, a banner, a social media post. Pull waits until a person shows intent: search, comparison sites, directories. Push builds demand; pull captures the demand that already exists. If you only do pull, you’ll never grow beyond the size of existing demand; if you only do push, you pay for attention you have nowhere to capture.

Two numbers for scale. NBC sold 30-second spots in Super Bowl LX (February 2026) for an average of $8 million, with several slots going for over $10 million: more than a quarter of a million dollars per second, not counting production and talent fees. At the other end: a YouTube ad can be skipped after 5 seconds, the non-skippable bumper is 6 seconds long, and you pay per thousand impressions.

The internet is the biggest advertising medium in Czechia. According to SPIR, CZK 70.7 billion went into internet advertising in 2025, 10.6% more than the year before. Display (banners, content networks, video, native formats, social media) accounted for CZK 51.1 billion, search for CZK 18.2 billion, and directories and classifieds for CZK 1.3 billion. Within display, video grew fastest (CZK 16.7 billion, +14.8%); 52% of display is shown on mobile.

A media plan rests on three quantities. Reach: how many different people see the ad. Frequency: how many times the average person sees it. Multiplied together, they give GRP (gross rating points), the currency of television and radio. One ad won’t stick, ten are annoying; the usual compromise is three to five exposures. The third quantity is context and timing: sports nutrition during a match broadcast works differently than in the middle of a romantic movie, and recruiting temporary workers in September works differently than in January.

Czechia has its quirks. Seznam, the homegrown Czech search engine, holds roughly 15% of searches according to Statcounter (Google 79%, Bing 5%, September 2026), and more on tablets; a campaign in Google Ads alone leaves a sixth of the intent on the table. On social media, according to the AMI Digital Index 2025 (1,010 internet users aged 15+, STEM/MARK), YouTube leads with 88%, Facebook has 84%, Instagram 67%, TikTok 37%, LinkedIn 24%; the average Czech spends 143 minutes a day on them. Among Gen Z, Instagram reaches 96% and TikTok 77%; among millennials, Facebook reaches 94%.

Public television is almost closed to advertising. ČT (Czech Television) may air ads only on ČT2 and ČT sport, at most 0.5% of daily airtime, and since May 1, 2025, it may not sell commercial messages on its website either; program sponsorship is capped at 50 hours a year on ČT1 and 260 hours in total.

Outdoor advertising has its own law. Since September 1, 2017, billboards outside towns and villages may not stand within 250 meters of highways or within 50 meters of first-class roads; around 3,000 of an estimated 25,000 billboards were supposed to disappear. Gas stations and businesses within 200 meters of their own premises are exempt. For a company with a warehouse by the D1 highway, this means its advertising belongs on its own site and building, not by the highway.

How is TV advertising bought? Airtime is sold by the sales departments and sales houses of TV groups. Nova sells its own channels; Prima’s channels and several other stations are sold by Media Club; Atmedia represents about twenty thematic channels, such as AXN, Discovery, and Eurosport; and Czech Television sells the ads on ČT2 and ČT sport itself. You don’t pay for seconds but for rating points. The GRPs from the start of this section add up spot by spot: one point is 1% of the target group that saw the spot. When they are counted in the narrower group the campaign is aimed at, say men aged 25 to 40, they are called TRPs (target rating points). The price of one point is the CPP (cost per point), and the price of a spot is roughly the CPP times the rating of the break, adjusted by coefficients. Czech Television’s commercial policy shows this in practice: the base CPP for 2026 is CZK 31,900 in the 15+ target group, a 30-second spot costs half as much again as a 20-second one, and prices in September and October are multiplied by a seasonal coefficient of 1.75, in January by only 0.8. Each broadcaster also sells a different buying target group: Nova viewers aged 15 to 54, Prima 18 to 69, ČT everyone aged 15 and up. That’s why the CPPs of different broadcasters can’t be compared directly.

The rate card is only the starting point. Large advertisers often don’t buy specific spots but a volume of points in a target group over a given period: the broadcaster places and moves the spots so that it delivers the points ordered. Nova recommends such a guaranteed GRP volume because in months of high demand these campaigns go on air first. Discounts are negotiated: for 2027, Nova gives 10% off a binding order placed by December 1 and further discounts when the advertiser leaves the placement of spots to the broadcaster or pays part of the order in advance. But points are getting scarcer and the legal cap on advertising, 20% of airtime between 6 a.m. and midnight for commercial broadcasters, can’t be exceeded, so broadcasters keep raising prices: for 2026, Nova by 16%, Prima by 17.5 to 19.5%, and Atmedia by 10% on average, and for 2027, Nova by another 12%. Outside the ad breaks, broadcasters sell sponsorship and product placement. Under the broadcasting act, the sponsor must be identified at the beginning and during or at the end of the program, and a sponsorship message must not directly encourage a purchase. Product placement is not allowed in news, in political and consumer affairs programs, or in religious and children’s programs, and a program containing it must be labeled at the beginning, at the end, and after every ad break.

Online video is bought in a different currency: you pay not for rating points but per thousand impressions (CPM, called CPT in broadcasters’ rate cards). TV groups also sell video in their own apps, known as BVOD. For 2026, Media Club offers premium video on Prima+ with a non-skippable 30-second spot for between CZK 530 and CZK 730 per thousand impressions, and it adds online views to its GRP packages as so-called eGRPs. The two currencies meet on smart TVs (CTV, connected TV): according to data Google presented in 2023, about a third of YouTube impressions in Czechia are shown on them. Ads on smart TVs can also be bought programmatically. Reach is measured with two different yardsticks. TV viewing is measured by ATO, which since 2018 has also covered TV programs watched on computers, phones, and smart TVs; online advertising is counted by the ad platforms themselves. Under the MRC standard, a video impression counts as viewable when at least half of the ad is on screen for two consecutive seconds, so a thousand impressions online is not the same as a thousand viewers in front of a TV. The difference between linear TV, video on demand, and catch-up viewing is covered in the Media chapter.

What can you rely on? NCSolutions (formerly Nielsen Catalina Solutions) linked campaigns for fast-moving consumer goods to actual household purchases. In 2017 (just under 500 campaigns), creative came out at 47% and context at 2%; the 2023 update (just under 450 campaigns) merged the two and works with five keys: creative 49%, brand strength 21% (15% in 2017), reach 14% (22%), targeting 11% (9%), recency 5%. When Advertiser Perceptions asked 305 brands and agencies in 2021 how they would split the effect, they gave targeting 22% and creative 17%. The market overestimates data and underestimates the idea. This holds for groceries and drugstore products; in other categories, the weights differ.

Creative has five elements. Headline: under six words, with a benefit or a question (“Forever Faster” from Puma, “Impossible is Nothing” from Adidas). Visual: authenticity (Messi in the locker room, not in a studio), movement, contrast, one focal point, a face showing emotion. Body copy: short sentences, a conversational tone, verbs in the imperative. Colors: red for energy, blue for trust, black for luxury, yellow for optimism; stick to the brand palette and leave negative space. Call to action (CTA): one, visible, with a strong verb.

Czech benchmarks for effectiveness come from the Effie awards, where the jury judges documented results against objectives. The 2025 Grand Prix went to Plzeňský Prazdroj, the brewer of Pilsner Urquell, and VCCP for Proud lager (“We reversed the current of Czech beer”; proud is Czech for current): the goal was to bring the young generation back to beer, and the result, in less than a year, was a sales share comparable to all foreign beers combined. The entries of Effie winners are the cheapest advertising course in Czechia.

How does advertising persuade? In 1986, Richard Petty and John Cacioppo described the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The recipient processes a message along one of two routes. Central: they think, weigh the arguments, compare the specs; an attitude formed this way lasts longer and predicts behavior better. Peripheral: they decide based on surface cues, a pretty face, music, a well-known personality, the rule “experts are right”; the attitude forms quickly but is more fragile.

Which route the recipient takes depends on motivation (how much the topic interests them, how much the decision costs them) and ability (whether they have the time, the calm and the knowledge). That’s why B2B logistics, tech and finance speak centrally (Tesla shows range and software), while lifestyle, sports and food go peripheral (Red Bull shows a jump from a height, not what’s in the drink). Most consumer advertising takes the peripheral route: a sports brand shows an athlete in slow motion, not a table of shoe specs.

The second framework is the hierarchy of effects: awareness, knowledge, preference, conviction, action. A brand has to teach before it sells. Apple: the teaser creates awareness, the keynote knowledge, feature demos preference, reviews conviction, and people buy on day one. A “buy now” spot doesn’t work on someone in the awareness stage.

And the recipient’s defense. Nielsen Norman Group has documented banner blindness since 1997: people ignore the places where ads usually are (the top strip, the right column) and anything that looks like an ad; for one user tracked on a travel site, the right column got just 0.8% of fixations. On mobile, people skip even a large image in an article that isn’t an ad. The more an ad looks like content, the more people see it, and the more important it is to label it honestly. More in the Psychology lesson.

Advertising in sports and in B2B logistics differs in everything except the principles. Audience: fans, athletes and sponsors versus supply chain managers, procurement teams and the C-suite. Message: emotional storytelling versus return on investment and a unique selling proposition (USP). Channels: social media, sponsorship, merch, TV and print versus trade media, LinkedIn, webinars, trade fairs and the company’s own website. Metrics: awareness and engagement versus cost per lead (an inquiry, the contact details of a prospect) and contract value. In B2B, there are fewer deals, they are bigger, more people decide, and it takes months; in B2C, there are many, they are small, and they happen in seconds. In between sits B2B2C: HOPI Logistics stores and transports goods for manufacturers and retail chains (the customers on hopilogistics.eu include Tesco, BILLA and Nestlé), but it’s the consumer who buys them, so a successful ad by a retail chain or a manufacturer indirectly helps logistics too.

Remember: the market is not the audience. The market is all potential customers; the audience is the people we talk to in a campaign. Confuse the two and you’ll either overpay or underdeliver. A B2B audience is described firmographically: company size, industry, region, job title. LinkedIn targets by job title, function and industry; it’s expensive per contact, but you won’t find logistics directors anywhere else.

The most important B2B number of recent years is 95:5. John Dawes (Ehrenberg-Bass) and the LinkedIn B2B Institute (Weinberg and Lombardo, 2021) showed that at any given moment only about 5% of business buyers are in the market; the other 95% will buy in months or years, and advertising won’t make them buy sooner. Companies change banks roughly once every five years, so in any one quarter about a twentieth are looking. The consequences: long-term objectives, creative that future buyers will remember, and broad reach across the whole category, not just companies showing intent signals. It’s a rule of thumb; the ratio depends on the purchase cycle, but the logic holds wherever people buy infrequently.

Sponsorship is a paid association with an entity that has the kind of audience and emotions advertising can’t buy: a club, a league, an athlete, a festival. For your money, you get rights: the name of the competition, a logo on the jersey and the perimeter boards, content, tickets and hospitality (hosting guests at the event), exclusivity in your category. Advertising buys space; sponsorship buys a relationship. The most common mistake is to pay for the rights and do nothing with them. There is no fixed rule for how much to spend on activation (your own campaign, content, hospitality, employees): according to 2011 IEG research cited by McKinsey, companies spent $0.50 to $1.60 on activation for every $1 of rights, and many were skimping; in IEG’s December 2016 survey, the average was $2.20.

A Czech example: since the 2024/25 season, the title partner of the top football league has been the betting company Chance (part of the Tipsport group), which bid CZK 260 million a year for five seasons in the tender. According to media estimates, Fortuna paid just under CZK 80 million a year, and price was the tender’s only criterion. It makes sense for a betting company, because its customers are exactly the league’s viewers.

The top end is shown by the Deloitte Football Money League: Real Madrid had revenue of almost €1.2 billion in the 2024/25 season, of which €594 million was commercial, 23% more than the year before, mainly thanks to better merchandise sales and new partners. Sponsorship works in B2B too: DHL is the logistics partner of Formula 1, and every move of the paddock between continents is an advertisement for the service it sells.

Related disciplines live around sponsorship. Ambush marketing: a brand piggybacks on an event without paying for the rights (before the 2015 Ice Hockey World Championship in Prague and Ostrava, the organizing committee recorded around 25 cases, such as ticket giveaways by companies that weren’t partners). Guerrilla: a cheap, unconventional stunt with a big impact (stunts by OKTAGON, the Czech and Slovak MMA promotion). Experiential marketing: a fan zone, the Slavia Fest before a match.

Merchandising is advertising that the customer pays you for: a jersey or a scarf carries the club crest everywhere the fan goes. In Czechia, according to E15, Sparta Prague has taken in over CZK 24 million at its airport fan shop since August 2024, roughly a tenth of its merch turnover; in fall 2026, Slavia Prague is opening a fan shop on the corner of Národní and Perlová streets and starting to sell on Alza, the largest Czech online retailer. A small club or camp will start more modestly: print on demand with no inventory, or a small limited run; selling where the emotion is (a tournament, a camp, a match) and in an online store (Shoptet, a Czech e-commerce platform). With print on demand, the price per item is higher and the margin lower; work it out from the supplier’s price list before the first design.

Ad platforms share the same skeleton: the campaign (objective and budget), the ad group (audience, placement, bid) and the ad (creative). Google Ads covers search, YouTube, the Display Network, Gmail, Maps and Discover. Sklik is the same thing from Seznam: search, Zboží.cz (Seznam’s shopping comparison site), a content network on more than 2,000 Czech websites, paid per click. Meta Ads Manager (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), LinkedIn Campaign Manager and TikTok Ads follow the same logic. On top of that sits programmatic: the advertiser’s demand-side platform (DSP) bids in a real-time auction (RTB) for every impression offered by the publisher’s supply-side platform (SSP). In Czechia, 75% of display advertising is bought programmatically (CZK 38.4 billion, SPIR 2025).

A fast-growing family of ad platforms is retail media: advertising sold by a retailer on its e-shop, in its app, or in its newsletter, and targeted by what people buy there. A manufacturer pays for a top spot in search results or in a category, a so-called sponsored product, or for a banner; the offsite variant takes the retailer’s data to other websites too. The model is Amazon, which made more than $68 billion from advertising in 2025. In Europe, according to IAB Europe, €13.3 billion went into retail media in 2025, 16.7% more than the year before and, for the first time, more than a tenth of digital advertising. In Czechia, Alza has run its own self-service system, alzaAds, since June 2025; in the first month, more than 70 partners launched almost 500 campaigns in it. Rohlik sells advertising on its e-shop and, since September 2024, beyond it through Criteo; Notino has a platform built on Criteo’s technology; and Allegro sells sponsored listings. Why it’s growing: the retailer knows its logged-in customers and what they actually buy, its own first-party data, and because the ad and the checkout are in one system, it sees whether a person bought after seeing the ad (a closed loop). But the results are reported by whoever sells the ad: Alza cites an average return on ad spend (ROAS) of around 700%. Whether people would have bought anyway can only be shown by a test with a control group, just as with the automated campaigns in the box below.

Two tools that are free and legal: the Meta Ad Library shows all active ads of any page on Facebook and Instagram, and the Google Ads Transparency Center does the same for Google and YouTube. Watch how many variants your competitors test and how long their creatives live (an ad that runs for a long time usually works). For timing, use Google Trends; for the size of the competition, Similarweb.

Put 10 to 20% of the budget into testing and the rest into scaling the winner. The most common technical mistake is missing conversion tracking: without it, the system optimizes for clicks that bring nothing.

Metrics are fractions made of a few numbers. CPM (cost per mille): the price per thousand impressions. CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions. CPC: cost per click. CVR (conversion rate): conversions divided by clicks. CPA / CPL: cost per action or per lead. ROAS (return on ad spend): revenue from advertising divided by its cost. CAC (customer acquisition cost): marketing and sales costs divided by the number of new customers. LTV (lifetime value): what a customer brings in over the whole relationship; as long as LTV is higher than CAC, you can pay more for acquisition than seems reasonable.

An example with CZK 10,000. At a CPM of CZK 100, you buy 100,000 impressions. At a CTR of 1%, that’s 1,000 clicks, a CPC of CZK 10. At a CVR of 2%, you have 20 orders, a CPA of CZK 500. With an average order of CZK 1,500, revenue is CZK 30,000 and ROAS is 3. Now move one variable: better creative raises CTR to 2%, and for the same money you get 2,000 clicks, 40 orders and a ROAS of 6. That’s why it pays to test headlines, not just raise bids.

Treat benchmarks as an order of magnitude, not a target. LocaliQ (formerly WordStream) reports an average CTR of 6.64%, CPC of $5.42, CPL of $66.69 and a conversion rate of 8.18% for US search in 2026. Compare data from the same year: according to WordStream, in 2025 a lead from Facebook (lead campaigns) cost an average of $27.66 and one from Google $70.11, so roughly a third as much; traffic campaigns on Facebook had a CTR of 1.71% at a CPC of $0.70. The only right benchmark is your own last month.

What did the advertising actually do? Analytics, surveys, A/B tests (two versions, one variable, enough data) and attribution models. “Last click” credits the purchase to the ad the person clicked last, which overestimates search and retargeting and underestimates the video and brand that prepared the purchase; multi-touch models share out the credit, but they only see what can be tracked. Measure brand advertising beyond the click too: searches for the brand name, direct visits, the question “how did you hear about us?”

The basic legal norm is Act No. 40/1995 Coll., on the Regulation of Advertising. It divides responsibility among the advertiser, the producer and the disseminator. It prohibits advertising that is an unfair commercial practice (including hidden advertising), advertising for illegal goods and prohibited gambling, harassing unsolicited printed advertising, and advertising contrary to good morals; it has special rules for tobacco, alcohol (not aimed at under-18s), medicines and children. Supervision lies with the regional trade licensing offices, and for broadcasting with the RRTV (the Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting); the Consumer Protection Act and GDPR also apply alongside it.

Alongside the law, there is self-regulation. The Czech Advertising Standards Council (Rada pro reklamu, RPR), a member of the European EASA since 1995, issues the Advertising Code: the industry’s ethical rules that go beyond the law (decency, honesty, truthfulness, protection of children, a ban on hidden advertising). Anyone can file a complaint; the arbitration committee reviews it, and the outcome is a recommendation. The RPR doesn’t impose fines, but it can refer a case to the trade licensing office.

Influencer marketing in Czechia is a market worth billions of crowns; according to TrendIn, the number of accounts with more than 10,000 followers grew by almost a third between 2024 and 2025, to more than 16,000. A substantial share of collaborations remains unlabeled, and penalties tend to be symbolic. The rules are simple: anything an influencer received money, a product or a discount for (barter is payment) is advertising and should be labeled “ad”, “paid partnership” or “sponsored content” at the start of the post, in the language of the content; a hashtag among twenty others is not enough. Both the advertiser and the influencer are responsible. The Fair Influencer Code now adds labeling of political advertising and AI-generated content, archiving for 24 months and a ban on targeting people under 18.

The last rule wasn’t set by anyone: people don’t want ads. According to GWI, in Q2 2025, 29.5% of internet users worldwide used an ad blocker at least occasionally, most often because there are too many ads, because they get in the way, and for privacy. The only defense against being ignored is advertising that people want to see.

Advertising is paid, non-personal and has an identified sponsor; it is the most visible tool of communication, not the only one. A campaign is a series of messages with one idea and one part of integrated marketing communication (IMC), which aligns all the tools and touchpoints. It’s built in seven steps from objective to evaluation; the money is split roughly 60:40 between brand and activation. Effectiveness is decided half by creative, a fifth by brand strength and only a tenth by targeting. Every medium does something different; in Czechia, the biggest is the internet at CZK 70.7 billion, Seznam holds 15% of search, and ČT is almost closed to advertising.

In B2B, 95:5 applies: advertising should make sure the buyer remembers you when their moment comes; in B2C, emotion decides. Sponsorship is association, not space, and it doesn’t work without activation. Metrics are fractions made of a few numbers; calculate them on your own budget before launch. And the rules: the law, the RPR Code, labeled collaborations, consent before tracking. Next time, Brand: what stays in people’s heads when the ad is over.