Several good replies already. Let me just add one more prspective.
Big, successful companies like Boeing have large marketing departments. It is very questionable whether such departments actually achieve anything, or achieve anything that couldn’t be achieved much more effectively in other ways. Nonetheless, there is an entrenched (and possibly out of date) notion that ‘we have to have a marketing department’, and so such departments continue to exist. These departments have to find things for themselves to do, and have to create some (arbitrary) justification for their own continued existence. This being so, one of the things they will do is ‘work’ with ad agencies to make expensive TV commercials and buy expensive airtime packages in which to show them.
I have put ‘work’ in inverted commas because there is no real work involved. It just entails sitting in very long and boring meetings, sipping water and expressing opinions, plus making phone calls and spending company money. Any twit can do it, and many do. The rules of the game are simple: the more money you get to spend, the more important you feel. Once in a while, some ghastly marketing mis-adventure will be deemed to have wasted such a spectacular amount of money that the long knives come out, and whichever team member can be most easily be made a scapegoat is fired. Then everything returns to normal. This kind of accountability is, however, quite rare. Trying to establish whether a given marketing ‘initiative’ has actually achieved anything is like trying to establish whether angels can dance on a pinhead, and so most of the time nobody bothers - so long as the haemorrhage of corporate funds is neither too great nor too egregiously stupid.
So, back to OP… one of the reasons why Boeing put ads on TV must be because someone, somewhere in their marketing department is someone who (a) enjoys the ‘movie making’ aspect of getting these ads on the air and the way ad companies treat him like royalty, and (b) because he can justify it to the Old Grey Men as being good for PR, good for brand building or just “one strand of the company’s coherent marketing strategy over the next annual cycle”. The truth is that in a company boardroom, if you use enough jargon, and have sucked up to the right people in the right way, you can make just about anything sound plausible. Whether the expensive TV ads actually have any effect on PR or branding or anything else is entirely a matter of opinion, guesswork and self-justifying alchemy.
For the record, I was once UK director of sales and marketing for a major, multi-national internet technologies company, and in addition I’ve been actively involved in the marketing activity of companies of comparable size to Boeing. Marketing is neither art nor science. It’s theology with flipcharts. And as with any other kind of theology, anything is true if you decide it’s true, or if you want it to be true.
