Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Hi

i agree with vikrant's answer regarding the line.

ATL is all advertisements that are done thrugh mass media (radio, TV, press/print etc.) and Out of Home (i.e. Billboards and others). Basically its all advertisement thats not done at outlet level.

BTL is all advertisement that is done at outlet/retail level as well as direct marketing and others mentioned by Vikrant.

hope this answers.

cheers!!

The "line" is the trerm used for the separation point between the two.

ATL refers to the five major media - the press, television, radio, cinema and outdoors, etc. Anyhting else is BTL. Again, the "line" meaning the separation between...the border...the doorway to the next level, and so on. It's a conceptual separation.


Here is an exerpt from the article link below:

"...Perhaps the best and most likely origin was sent in from an old agency hand. In the early days, he said, billing documents and billing systems referred only to commissioned media. When types of media came about that didn’t involve agency commissions, new parts of the billing statements needed to be added on, usually done manually with a line drawn between the parts. The fact that non-commission media were necessarily below this line makes this explanation the one with the best correlation. "

https://www.marketingprofs.com/3/tillinghast15.asp

I hope this helps.

To really understand the source of this term, you have to look at an oversimplified business financial statement:

Total Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold = Gross Profit
Gross Profit - Operating Expenses = Net Profit

Any marketing/sales expenses that can be tied explicitly to a sale (direct marketing campaigns, commissions) fall into the Cost of Goods Sold category, and thus ATL.

Marketing expenses for printing brochures, producing a website, broadcast advertising, and so forth fall into the Operating Expenses category, and thus BTL.

Take a moment to use the Search Questions link on the right side of this page, and use the keyword "BTL" to see other threads that address the same question. One, for example, is here:
https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=401