Image hitting a wall at 30.28

[Gary]

This is very strange.

I've been running a permanent newspaper campaign and my image consistently climbed very nicely till it reached about 30.28 and it fell back to 29.8.
I increased my service and advertising personal and it climbed again to 30.28........and then it fell back to 29.8 .

This has repeated at least 6 or 7 times.

What's going on ?

[RushmoreAir]

Maintenance and condition of aircraft, plus flight delays and cancellations all have an effect on your CI.  Besides, 1 point doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

[Gary]

I'm in beginners world and I pay close attention to flight delays and cancellations, mine are among the best in the game.......I'm usually in the top 10 or 15.
My aircraft are all about 90% condition and better.

And what do you mean 1 point does'nt make any difference.......I want my image to keep rising........1 point after another.

This problem does not make any sense.

[Sigma]

What you describe is how CI works.  You don't become an airline known to positively the world over simply by advertising in a newspaper.  Only one thing makes CI go up -- Money.  When it hits a wall that means you need to spend more money.  And you repeat that until you get to 100 (or whereever you want to stop, a CI of 100 is expensive to maintain)

I wrote a couple posts in this thread that discuss how it works:

https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,18435.0.html

[Gary]

So it looks like newspapers will only take you to 30 and that's it.......no matter how much you spend on advertising staff.

I started radio advertising and right away my image is going up again.

How far will radio advertising go before it hits a barrier ?

And if that's the way this works then I should be able to remove my newspaper advertising because it got me to 30, and now radio will let me go to where ever it's barrier is at.
Each type of advertising has a barrier you can't go past and the next level of advertising removes that barrier till you hit the next barrier.

Is this correct ?

[RushmoreAir]

Newspaper, Billboard, Radio & TV (without internet) have got me to 80.  With Newspaper, Billboard and Radio, I got to 55-60.

[schro]

If you want to get to 100, then you're looking at consistantly spending about 10% of revenues on ad campaigns. Ad costs don't scale lineraly with revenue, so you've got to add more to get there...

[Sigma]

So it looks like newspapers will only take you to 30 and that's it.......no matter how much you spend on advertising staff.

I started radio advertising and right away my image is going up again.

How far will radio advertising go before it hits a barrier ?

And if that's the way this works then I should be able to remove my newspaper advertising because it got me to 30, and now radio will let me go to where ever it's barrier is at.
Each type of advertising has a barrier you can't go past and the next level of advertising removes that barrier till you hit the next barrier.

Is this correct ?

No.

"Newspaper" doesn't really mean anything.  "Radio" doesn't really mean anything.

It's all a matter of money.  So whatever you were spending would only get you to 30.  It doesn't matter if you got to that amount of money by using Newspaper, Radio, TV, or whatever.  It doesn't matter whether you got to that amount of money by advertising Locally or Globally.  It's all a matter of how much money you were spending.  And the amount of money you need to reach a certain CI depends on how many different O/D pairs you are flying.  It will be very, very different for every airline just how much it costs to reach a certain CI because every airline has a different mix of routes and revenues from those routes.

So if you cancelled your Newspaper campaign and kept your radio one, your total spend would decrease and the CI you would reach would also decrease.  It would continue to rise but at a slower pace and ultimately stop at a lower number than it would with a combined Newspaper/Radio campaign because the amount of money you were spending was less.

[Sigma]

If you want to get to 100, then you're looking at consistantly spending about 10% of revenues on ad campaigns. Ad costs don't scale lineraly with revenue, so you've got to add more to get there...

This is HIGHLY dependent on the number of routes you have, not any set figure.

I've had airlines where it would require 60% of revenues to even hope to reach 100 (if it was even possible at all, obviously I couldn't try it, but 40% wasn't even getting me close).  And I've had airlines where 5% was more than enough.

It all depends on how many routes you're flying and how dense they are.  Obviously an airline with a few very dense routes isn't going to have to do a lot of advertising whereas one that flies to 200 cities is.

[Gary]

Obviously the ideal is to strike a balance between spending money on advertising and spending that same money on growth with new planes.
That's what I'm trying to do here.......get the most bang from my advertising buck !

My newspaper advertising did'nt slow down as I approached 30, it was doing fine at 29 and at 30.28 it stopped dead........actually the wall is at 30 and it just shot past a bit and then fell back down.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who ran into this.

You are right about at least part of it..........that it takes another advertising campaign to move past 30.
But......does it take just a different one or an additional campaign ?

So I'm putting that to the test.........it's the only way I'll find out.
I added a radio campaign to my newspaper and my image score took off again.
And then I took the newspaper campaign off, my image increases stalled for a bit but now it's moving up nicely again......not as fast as with both campaigns but we'll see how far I get with just radio advertising.

[Sigma]

You are right about at least part of it..........that it takes another advertising campaign to move past 30.
But......does it take just a different one or an additional campaign ?

So I'm putting that to the test.........it's the only way I'll find out.

I've already told you what it takes -- more money.  A "campaign" doesn't mean anything.  It's all about the money.

If you've got 4 separate $1M/wk campaigns and your CI stops at 50, you can add another $1M/wk campaign and your CI will go up, you can upgrade one to a $2M/wk campaign, you can upgrade all of them to $1.25M/wk campaigns, or you can close them all in favor of a single $5M/wk campaign, and you'll get the same exact effect to your CI because you're weekly spending would be the same.

[ArcherII]

Obviously the ideal is to strike a balance between spending money on advertising and spending that same money on growth with new planes.
That's what I'm trying to do here.......get the most bang from my advertising buck !

My newspaper advertising did'nt slow down as I approached 30, it was doing fine at 29 and at 30.28 it stopped dead........actually the wall is at 30 and it just shot past a bit and then fell back down.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who ran into this.

You are right about at least part of it..........that it takes another advertising campaign to move past 30.
But......does it take just a different one or an additional campaign ?

So I'm putting that to the test.........it's the only way I'll find out.
I added a radio campaign to my newspaper and my image score took off again.
And then I took the newspaper campaign off, my image increases stalled for a bit but now it's moving up nicely again......not as fast as with both campaigns but we'll see how far I get with just radio advertising.

It's all about how much money you spend in Ads. The more money you use for ads, the more CI. Of course growing CI is costly and its not linear, it's more like x² or x⁴. This means that if you, say, want to grow from 50 to 60 you will need to spend roughly the same amount you spend to rise all over to 50. It gets even worse in the highlands. I read in a post the other day that in order to rise from 90 to 100 you had to invest the same amount of money it took to have 90!

And it doesn't matter which campaign you use, it's all about money in the end. 

[minerva]

Obviously the ideal is to strike a balance between spending money on advertising and spending that same money on growth with new planes.
That's what I'm trying to do here.......get the most bang from my advertising buck !

My newspaper advertising did'nt slow down as I approached 30, it was doing fine at 29 and at 30.28 it stopped dead........actually the wall is at 30 and it just shot past a bit and then fell back down.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who ran into this.

You are right about at least part of it..........that it takes another advertising campaign to move past 30.
But......does it take just a different one or an additional campaign ?

So I'm putting that to the test.........it's the only way I'll find out.
I added a radio campaign to my newspaper and my image score took off again.
And then I took the newspaper campaign off, my image increases stalled for a bit but now it's moving up nicely again......not as fast as with both campaigns but we'll see how far I get with just radio advertising.

As Sigma has explained -- and he knows more about how the sim works than most of us who've been here for a some time -- you should ignore the 'campaign' types; whether you invest in radio or TV or do a national campaign or a world wide one, it doesn't matter.  Each of the campaigns types is just a way of organizing the amount spent.  All they are is different levels of funding; you can mix and match to find the level of spending that you need.  All the other advice about the need to spend money proportionate to your position is basically right.  There are some glass ceilings in CI -- you've hit one, 30 -- there is another at 70 and a big one at 90.  If you get stuck at one of these ceilings you have to add more money to marketing to get CI moving again.  How much depends on how quickly you want it to rise and what you can afford.  I can tell you that I'm currently spending nearly 20% of my income on marketing to get my CI to 100 (its at 97 right now).  I was happy to stay at 90 for about a game year, mainly because moving up from there is costing about 50% more than I was spending to keep me at 90 (and I'm only inching up at about 0.2% per week.)  Ultimately, its probably not worth the money, but I'd never gone beyond 90 before so I wanted to see if it made any material difference.

[schro]

As Sigma has explained -- and he knows more about how the sim works than most of us who've been here for a some time -- you should ignore the 'campaign' types; whether you invest in radio or TV or do a national campaign or a world wide one, it doesn't matter.  Each of the campaigns types is just a way of organizing the amount spent.  All they are is different levels of funding; you can mix and match to find the level of spending that you need.  All the other advice about the need to spend money proportionate to your position is basically right.  There are some glass ceilings in CI -- you've hit one, 30 -- there is another at 70 and a big one at 90.  If you get stuck at one of these ceilings you have to add more money to marketing to get CI moving again.  How much depends on how quickly you want it to rise and what you can afford.  I can tell you that I'm currently spending nearly 20% of my income on marketing to get my CI to 100 (its at 97 right now).  I was happy to stay at 90 for about a game year, mainly because moving up from there is costing about 50% more than I was spending to keep me at 90 (and I'm only inching up at about 0.2% per week.)  Ultimately, its probably not worth the money, but I'd never gone beyond 90 before so I wanted to see if it made any material difference.

I've noticed that the incline from 90 to 100 only ticks along at .1%-.2% increase no matter how much money you throw at it. I'd say if you have momentum going from 90-100 (as long as you don't get stuck at 95), any further money spent is moot. It takes a good game year + to do 90-100...