Selecting an Advertising Agency : A Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach

Indian economy is evolving day by day, and with an upswing spending power of its inhabitants advertising has been emerging as one of the most effective tools for the companies to reach out to their customers. Best advertisement agencies create value through giving the product personality, developing an understanding of product/service, creating an image or memorable picture of that product and above all trying to distinguish the product apart from its competitors. Today, advertising budgets of companies are rising and thus there are numerous agencies in the market vying for their shares. But there exists no method, which can take into account numerous criterions and their impact simultaneously under consideration while selecting a best advertisement agency. Selecting an advertisement agency is a multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem that requires considering large number of complex factors as multiple evaluation criteria. A robust MCDM method should consider the interactions among criteria. Analytic network process (ANP) is a relatively new MCDM method which can deal with all kinds of interactions systematically. This paper proposes an ANP based methodology for the selection of advertisement agencies. ANP is capable of measuring the relative importance that captures all indirect interactions in a network required to be considered in an advertisement agency selection and also their interactions. Additionally, the proposed model is evaluated for a case company.