Advertising is an audio or visual form of marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Sponsors of advertising are often businesses wishing to promote their products or services. Advertising is differentiated from public relations in that an advertiser usually pays for and has control over the message. It differs from personal selling in that the message is non-personal, i.e., not directed to a particular individual. Advertising is communicated through various mass media, including old media such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, outdoor advertising or direct mail; and new media such as search results, blogs, social media, websites or text messages. The actual presentation of the message in a medium is referred to as an advertisement or “ad” for short.Commercial ads often seek to generate increased consumption of their products or services through “branding”, which associates a product name or image with certain qualities in the minds of consumers. On the other hand, ads that intend to elicit an immediate sale are known as direct-response advertising. Non-commercial advertisers who spend money to advertise items other than a consumer product or service include political parties, interest groups, religious organizations and governmental agencies. Non-profit organizations may use free modes of persuasion, such as a public service announcement. Advertising may also be used to reassure employees or shareholders that a company is viable or successful.Modern advertising originated with the techniques introduced with tobacco advertising in the 1920s, most significantly with the campaigns of Edward Bernays, considered the founder of modern, “Madison Avenue” advertising.In 2015 advertisers worldwide spent an estimated US$529.43 billion on advertising. Advertising’s projected distribution for 2017 was 40.4% on TV, 33.3% on digital, 9% on newspapers, 6.9% on magazines, 5.8% on outdoor and 4.3% on radio. Internationally, the largest (“big four”) advertising-agency groups are Interpublic, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP.In Latin, adventure means “to turn towards”.Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters. Commercial messages and political campaign displays have been found in the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Arabia. Lost and found advertising on papyrus was common in ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Wall or rock painting for commercial advertising is another manifestation of an ancient advertising form, which is present to this day in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. The tradition of wall painting can be traced back to Indian rock art paintings that date back to 4000 BC.In ancient China, the earliest advertising known was oral, as recorded in the Classic of Poetry (11th to 7th centuries BC) of bamboo flutes played to sell confectionery. Advertisement usually takes in the form of calligraphic signboards and inked papers. A copper printing plate dated back to the Song dynasty used to print posters in the form of a square sheet of paper with a rabbit logo with “Jinan Liu’s Fine Needle Shop” and “We buy high-quality steel rods and make fine-quality needles, to be ready for use at home in no time” written above and below is considered the world’s earliest identified printed advertising medium.In Europe, as the towns and cities of the Middle Ages began to grow, and the general population was unable to read, instead of signs that read “cobbler”, “miller”, “tailor”, or “blacksmith”, images associated with their trade would be used such as a boot, a suit, a hat, a clock, a diamond, a horseshoe, a candle or even a bag of flour. Fruits and vegetables were sold in the city square from the backs of carts and wagons and their proprietors used street callers (town criers) to announce their whereabouts. The first compilation of such advertisements was gathered in “Les Crieries de Paris”, a thirteenth-century poem by Guillaume de la Villeneuve.
Best in Class Finance Functions For Police Forces
Background
Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.
Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.
The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.
The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.
Challenge
Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.
In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.
Developing a Best in Class Finance Function
Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.
1) Aligning to Force Strategy
As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.
Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.
The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.
Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.
2) Supporting Force Decisions
Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.
Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk
Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.
A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.
3) Value to the Force
The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:
Centralization
By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.
With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.
The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:
o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support
However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:
o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force
A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.
To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.
Process Efficiencies
Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.
Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.
Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.
Culture
Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.
A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.
Organizational Improvements
Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.
Technology Enabled Improvements
There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.
These include:
A) Scanning and workflow
Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.
B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool
Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:
o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.
o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.
The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.
C) Database solution
Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.
Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.
D) Customize reports
In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.
In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.
These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.
Conclusion
It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.
While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.
Good Nutrition Starts at a Cellular Level
If the cells lose even the smallest amount of ability to produce energy for the body, the result is a decline in our general health and the emergence of sometime multiple degenerative conditions.Healthy cells produce our “vitality” – the body’s healthy energy level and natural resistance to stress.The big question becomes, how do we make sure our cells are working at full throttle on the energy front? Fortunately, maintaining healthy cells is fairly simple as scientific research shows that good nutrition is the key.Cells and energyWhat we eat can affect our cells and their efficiency in producing energy. The mitochondria or the “power plants” of the cell each contains a unique pattern of DNA, and their job is to facilitate cellular respiration, a process through which they transform oxygen and nutrients into energy and water.The finger-like folds in the mitochondrial inner membrane contain the respiratory “chains” where this process takes place.Unfortunately, oxygen, which is needed for this process to occur, is toxic to biological molecules and cells. That means that all processes involving oxygen, including cellular respiration, creates free radicals as a by-product.It’s just a consequence of normal metabolism, but these free radicals tend to oxidize biological molecules, just like iron oxidizes when it rusts. Over time, this oxidation can damage the cells, and halt cellular respiration, leading to the death of the cell.The body’s defense against this toxicity is to use antioxidant molecules against the free radicals.The body however, does not always get it right, and sometimes it is not able to produce enough antioxidants for the job. The result is that free radicals move around freely, ravaging the body’s proteins, fats, and DNA/RNA. The body will remove and repair some damaged macromolecules, but often the sheer overwhelming number of free radicals brings the repair system to its knees.Oxidative stressIn 1956, Professor Denham Harman came up with a theory that postulates that as we age and the oxidative damage the body has sustained over the years takes its toll, the level of oxidative stress rises.This means that oxidative damage increases over the course of a lifetime and accelerates in old age. At that point, we tend to see the occurrence of degenerative diseases, and obvious signs of ageing.Oxidative stress and chronic degenerative diseasesToday, scientists and doctors widely agree that oxidative stress figures prominently in eye problems such as cataracts and macular degeneration, atherosclerosis and heart disease, cell mutation and cancer, all kinds of inflammatory conditions, as well as brain and nervous system conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.Neutralizing free radicals and disease preventionSo how do we reduce or prevent free radical damage to the cells?If oxidative stress increases when antioxidant defenses are compromised and free radical levels rise, surely we can decrease oxidative stress by improving the body’s antioxidant defenses and reducing the number of free radicals floating around the blood and tissues.Optimal cellular nutritionThe experts agree: Optimal cellular nutrition is the best way to boost the body’s natural defenses.This involves providing ALL nutrients to the cell at optimal levels, and allowing the cell to decide what it does and does not need.This way, we can ensure that there aren’t any nutritional deficiencies – because nutrient levels will automatically be corrected within a few months of regaining optimal cell nutrition.This seems easy enough, but one question still unanswered is: Which nutrients are needed for optimal cellular nutrition?Basically, it means giving your body all the antioxidants in addition to the supporting B vitamins and antioxidant minerals.It has been noted by some researchers that the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of each nutrient may in fact not be enough for our cells to prevent many health conditions. The RDAs are old, determined during the WW years, and apply to minimum nutrient intake to ward off deficiency diseases common back then. As a result, they don’t take into account conditions such as chronic degenerative diseases, which occur more frequently today.Optimal levels to prevent degenerative diseaseToday, the optimal levels of nutrients known to provide health benefits are much greater than the recommended daily allowances: eg: some studies show that the optimal level of vitamin C is approximately 1200 to 2000 mg daily, the RDA is only 60 mg.Because the enormous amount of fresh vegetables and fruit we would have to eat to obtain these new levels of nutrition is unmanageable for humans, the best, and most logical way to get optimum levels of vitamins,minerals and other nutrients is to take a good quality supplement.Think of cellular nutrition as a very wise way of using the supplement and your food as “preventative medicine” to stop the disease process before it even begins.It is a Myth that If I have a healthy diet, I do not need to take any supplementation.In fact, it is proven that if a large group of people were to follow the exact same dietary lifestyle & exercise program, a percentage would still suffer from high or low blood pressure, high or low blood sugar, or high or low stomach acid, while others could develop arthritis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, mental illness, or other medical conditions.Most nutrition-related health issues in Western society are not caused by nutritional deficiencies, but rather nutritional imbalances, which will negatively affect cellular nutrition and are responsible for many common medical problems in older people, while metabolic disorders can cause nutritional deficiencies following the malabsorption of certain nutrients.When we analyze people living to a ripe old age in reasonable health without the need of supplementation, we find that they had a lot of odds in their favor: good genes and a lack of factors that tend to upset the biochemical balance necessary to maintain good health. Anything upsetting the cellular nutrition balance will do one of three things: shorten someone’s life, worsen its quality, or require compensation through extra nutritional support or drug intervention.The difference between people who take nutritional supplements (that match cellular nutrition requirements), and those who do not can always be detected in the way the body handles a crisis/trauma. If you look at younger people in a crisis situation, they simply tend to handle various medical situations better, or recover faster than older ones. This would suggest that by ingesting the correct nutritional supplementation we could in fact be lowering our biological age