A great article from clickz today entitled Survey Finds Advertising Important, But Flawed. There’s a lot of points to draw from this article for our applications. Put yourself in the advertising agency seat.

Most of the 9,000 senior executives polled agreed that advertising is an important driver of corporate success.

We’re responsible for letting people know about our message and our sites. Success happens when people learn and understand our message.

“the advertising industry seems to have a poor grasp of the business issues confronting organizations like mine”

How well do you know your target audience? Are you designing your marketing for them, for yourself, or for your boss?

“Part of this is people saying that their agencies don’t ‘get’ their business. But I think a lot of them are saying that they don’t ‘get’ the success criteria that the people the agencies are serving are dealing with”

It’s about keeping the most important thing the most important thing. The focus of your marketing efforts should be measured by what your task is. Who is your site for? What do you want to to do? Define your success criteria and everything should flow from there.

“In the past, it was OK for the age-old quote about half our advertising dollars being wasted. That’s not good enough any more. The stakes are too high.”

Man, if they are saying this about selling products, how more true is it for ministry?

The survey found that top business decision-makers see the Web as the most important source of information about business. The gap between the Internet and other media is even more pronounced in the UK, Germany, China, Japan and Mexico than in the U.S. “…people are going to the Web more and more; that senior business decision-makers are among the highest numbers of those people; and that they now see this medium as the most important medium in terms of business news and analysis.”

Well, I’d love to read your comments on all of this. Post’em below.