Hi Carla,

I'm responsible for marketing and communications at the British Council office in Porto, Portugal and I ran the British Council Portugal national advertising campaign in 2008-2009 so I have experience of all the promotional media you mention.

By having studied the ELT market in Portugal (and producing competitor analysis documents) over the past 18 months I can tell you that advertising is important, at least for maintaining brand awareness if not acually raising it! One of our prinicipal Portuguese competitors invests in frequent, glossy advertising in national 'papers and we cannot NOT be seen in those places! Of course, there are signifcant costs involved...Word of mouth advertising is great and we do depend on it quite a lot in Portugal, where we seem to have lots of students re-registering to study with us year in, year out - especially youngsters. But it needs nurturing, not just with the occasional advertising campaign, but also through other promotional/ marketing activity which touches on customer care, such as holding focus groups, surveying stakeholders and so on. (see the presentation and handout I've uploaded to accompany the session I gave in Cardiff last Wednesday).

Regarding the best media, well, I've started exploring on-line advertising and ran a small banner ad on the homepage of a national 'paper in Portugal for a week in January. The joy of running that ad was that after the week of airing I was provided with figures for the number of visitors to the website that clicked on our advert to access the British Council Portugal homepage - so it was measureable - which I have not found out how to do when running a paper-based advert. As for the design and slogan - I did work with a design agency to create something smooth and professional. In the case of the on-line banner here, it cost 400 euros for the design. The advertising space I was offered for free due to contacts I'd built up. We got 371 hits, so it worked out to be rather good value, comparatively.

Finally, brochures and flyers - yes, we tend to make them in-house with Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign - but it is time-consuming...

What sort of advertising were you thinking of getting involved in? Maria

Dear Maria,

   Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience about advertising with us.  I am going to watch your presentation and comment it later.  You must have a great budget to be able to advertise in newspapers and on-line but if you main competitor is doing it you must, right?

     We have experience advertising in readio mainly in stations that focus on executives and managers because our institute specializes in teaching Business English to companies.  We also have in-house designed brochures and flyers and we rely on word-of-mouth a lot!  I believe the possibilty of having figures to be able to measure your on-line advertisement is a good value, we should try it.

    Talk to you soon,

Carla