The advertisers, advertising agencies and media can hardly get completely harmonized for long for their respectively independent operating systems and interesting relationships. Advertising effectiveness has been a sensitive topic all along; hence the senior symposium on it was convened on Aug. 10, 2006 at CEIBS Beijing campus by China EFFIE Awards Promotion Committee, CEIBS Beijing Representative Office, and Market Observer-Advertiser.

Co-chaired by Xiao Kaining, Director of China EFFIE Awards Promotion Committee and Chairman of China EFFIE Awards Judging Committee, and Prof. Huang Shengmin, President of Communication University of China (CUC), the symposium was taken in a round-table form. The participants focused their discussion on how to avoid ineffective advertising for enterprises. They fully stated their opinions from their respective standpoints and expressed their original views on such hotspots as business advertising, crisis PR, selection of endorser, and monitoring of advertising effectiveness.

Then, Prof. Huang Shengmin delivered a keynote speech on fragmentation of advertising media communications. According to him, after entering into the new Millennium, along with the rapid development of information industry, three major traditional media are becoming decreasingly important, while a wide variety of new media are created with advanced technologies. The recently emerging digital media are in the ascendant. Advertising with its information conveyed via media has been fragmented, and the audience no longer believes the information from single source. Digital information changed the media's business model. The feature that information can be "infinitely poduced, transmitted and demanded" results in the requirements of large-scale business operation and information operation as well as holistic marketing in product promotion. Now the enterprises have to give up on the dream of being able to pulse the consumer demand, and make effective communications focusing on consumer contact points instead.

In the afternoon, Shao Huadong, Vice Director of Advertiser Research Institute, College of Advertising Studies, CUC, and Xiao Kaining, Director of China EFFIE Awards Promotion Committee delivered a research report on "Interpretations on China's Advertisers" and a keynote speech of "Primary Study on Advertising Supervision" respectively. According to Shao Huadong, 2005 China advertisers study shows a change in the advertisers' dominating role in advertising market. 42.5% of advertisers believed that advertisers were the dominant force in this market and the cooperation between advertisers and advertising agencies was increasingly unstable and in multi-parties. Specifically, on the one hand, more respondent advertisers tend to "cooperate with no fixed advertising agencies". On the other hand, the cooperation period is gradually shortened. With advertisers improving their brand awareness and diversification of brand communication means, public relations gradually become a new driving force in branding and marketing breakthrough. Advertisers are in urgent need of strengthening cooperation with the media and forcing them to normalize their price system. In cooperation with advertising agencies, advertisers pay more attention to their influence resources and execution.

Xiao Kaining, Director of China EFFIE Awards Promotion Committee, proposed a third-party advertising supervision service from the perspective of advertising effectiveness monitoring. Since adverting is a kind of investment, its output and input are related to the return on investment. Therefore, advertising effectiveness is the fundamental objective of advertising, as well as the goal that has been pursued by all advertisers and advertising agencies all along. Xiao boldly predicted that, since the current advertising market was not well normalized and regulated, advertising supervision service would emerge as the time required. However, a good relationship between advertising supervisors and advertisers, advertising agencies and media must be built, and the role of advertising supervisor was to serve the three parties in a fair and ethical manner and to strive for a sound development of advertising industry.

At the end of the symposium, all the participants expressed positive comments on this meeting for its satisfactory form, original ideas, and a good chance of face-to-face round-table discussion among advertisers, advertising agencies and media. Next time, more advertisers, advertising agencies, media and academic organizations will be invited to the symposium.