- A.Russell Colley's framework setting advertising objectives by communication stage — Awareness, Comprehension, Conviction, Action — to make ads measurable.
- B.Four methods for setting an advertising budget — affordable, percentage of sales, competitive parity, and objective-and-task — each with different strategic implications.
- C.Push strategies move product to channel partners through trade promotion; pull strategies create consumer demand that pulls product through the channel.
- D.The two basic media planning metrics — Reach (how many unique people see the ad) and Frequency (how many times the average person sees it) — and the trade-off between them. ✓
Reach and Frequency is the two basic media planning metrics — Reach (how many unique people see the ad) and Frequency (how many times the average person sees it) — and the trade-off between them. The other options describe related but distinct concepts in Promotion & IMC — see the deep-dive guide for the full distinction.
How to think about questions like this
Trading off reach vs frequency is the fundamental media-planning decision. Questions like this test whether you can distinguish Reach and Frequency from neighboring concepts. The most common trap is choosing a closely-related concept that sounds similar but applies in a different context.
When you see a definition question on an exam, do two things: (1) translate the question into your own words, then (2) generate the answer in your own words before reading the options. This avoids the cognitive bias of recognizing a familiar phrase as correct just because it is familiar.