When you listen to conversations about marketing, including some that involve marketing professionals, it’s not unusual to realize that when they say the word "marketing" they really mean "advertising".

Marketing is a multi-stepped, multi-disciplined function of business. And if you spent one day in a Marketing 101 class you learned pretty quickly that those multiple steps are often referred to as the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Advertising is part of that last P, which happens to be last for a reason. If you don’t get the first three right, the last one isn’t going to go very well, either.

There are many reasons that successful advertising is so hard to come by. Here are 10 of the most common. You may have others to add to the list. Please do.

10 Things That Kill An Ad Program

Listed in no particular order:

10: Not understanding your brand. Where do you fit into the marketplace? What is your unique selling proposition? What do you do well? What do you sell that customers want. This is where you should focus your messaging.

9: Lack of financial commitment. The smartest, most on-target, well-crafted advertising campaigns can’t overcome a lack of money to get the job done.

8: Abandoning a campaign before its time. Advertisers get tired of campaigns before customers do and often change directions just as the campaign begins to develop some equity.

7: Managing by committee. Producing good advertising requires insight, understanding, courage and sometimes even a little risk taking. Committees are typically not breeding grounds for this type of thinking.

6: Feeding the need to be in familiar territory. When decision makers fail to fully understand the task at hand, they tend to opt for what seems safe. Safe advertising is unmemorable, invisible advertising that looks and sounds like the competition. David Ogilvy said, “If someone in the room isn’t nervous about running the ad, it probably isn’t worth doing.”

5: Not letting your dog hunt. A truly great client used to say, “If you have a hunting dog you have to let him do the hunting, or else get another a dog.” The same is true for your ad agency. You either trust them to do the job, or you get someone you do trust. But you don’t do their job for them.

4: Ignoring your customers. Many a campaign has been designed around what the advertiser wants to say, not what customers want to hear.

3: Not demanding uniqueness. If you can take a competitor’s logo and place it in your ad without changing copy, get another ad.

2: Lack of consistency. If you take samples of all your branding work and lay them out on a table, do they look and sound like they belong to a single company? Or do they look like a patchwork quilt?

1: Using advertising to fix a brand problem. If your brand promise isn’t matching your brand’s performance, then advertising is the last thing you should do. Always fix the brand first.