qxd 1/1/2005 08:54 PM Page 106 Promotional Media Chapter Outline 5 The media infrastructure for advertising and promotion has grown and changed over the last 20 years. This chapter discusses the implications of such change for media strategy and planning. The medium on which promotional communication is conveyed informs the consumer’s interpretation of the message. In other words, the ‘medium is the message’ (McLuhan, 1964), and this chapter describes the qualities of each medium.
It also indicates the many categories of advertising and promotion that can be carried on differing media.0 The UK Media Infrastructure In the UK in 2000 £17,000 million was spent on advertising.1 Most of this went on display advertising in all media, the remainder on classified (small) ads, recruitment and business press advertising, and company announcements. Organizations spend significant additional sums on other forms of communication, such as exhibitions, sponsorship, sales promotion and mail order. In the UK there are well over 10,000 printed publications2 serving all types of readership. The 10 major daily national newspapers sell in excess of 14 million copies per day in total.
There are three commercial television channels serving the UK, made up of 15 programme companies (not counting cable and satellite channels). The UK allows up to seven and a half minutes advertising per hour on terrestrial channels, and up to nine minutes per hour on satellite and cable channels. Also serving the R2011046ch-05.qxd 1/1/2005 08:54 PM Page 107 Promotional Media 107 UK are over 240 commercial radio stations, plus outdoor sites, cinema advertising and many other media. The Media Infrastructure The media planning task is to negotiate optimum levels of exposure for the campaign, utilizing the most cost-effective and appropriate combinations of media possible.
The media planner seeks to expose the creative execution to a relevant audience with the greatest possible reach and penetration. The cost effectiveness of the exposure is often assessed by the cost-per-thousand criterion. The media infrastructure in a given country influences the character of its advertising and promotion. Jefkins said that advertising media consist of ‘any means by which sales messages can be conveyed’ to audiences (2000: 74).
Communication is usually said to be mediated (that is, carried on a medium) when there is some intervening vehicle between the source and the receiver, such as a newspaper or poster site. Advertising messages can be carried on radio waves, static outdoor billboards, paper and ink, ceramic mugs and ball- point pens, dynamic outdoor sites such as motor vehicles and public transport; even air balloons and loud hailers can carry promotional messages. Colloquially all promotional communication is viewed as ‘advertising’ although industry professionals regard advertising as those promotions carried on mass media only. The availability of advertising media can vary greatly in different regions.
In the developed north there is a complex communications infrastructure that reaches most of the population through thousands of press publications, radio and TV shows and other media. In the developing south there is a far less well-developed communications infrastructure, and also lower levels of TV ownership and adult literacy. Audiences are, in general, more difficult to reach where the communications infrastructure is less developed. Media Planning and Strategy Clever and thorough media strategy and planning are indispensable to the success of advertising.
A promotional campaign cannot be effective if it is not seen by a sufficient number of interested consumers. The central task of the advertising media planner is to select, negotiate and buy media exposure for the campaign, to ensure that the ads will reach the largest number of desired consumers possible within the media budget. Broadly, media planning refers to the task of placing finished ads in appropriate media channels for maximum target group exposure at least cost per thousand. Media strategy usually refers to the judgements made concerning the fit R2011046ch-05.qxd 1/1/2005 08:54 PM Page 108 108 Advertising and Promotion between media channels, creative executions and the brand personality.
The media strategy has to ensure that there is coherence between media, brand and creative execution. This distinction may often obtain without the terminology: in many professional contexts media planning is assumed to entail strategic decisions. So, while the media planning task tends to be quantitatively driven by the cost per thousand and number of exposures, media strategy requires more qualitative judgements. Many questions need to be addressed.
Which medium possesses the qualities that will provide the maximum impact for a given ad? What are the viewing/reading/listening habits of the target audience and how might they be reached? What interval frequency of advertising exposure will best support the campaign objectives? Can the campaign creative executions be integrated across differing media so that consumers’ view of the brand is reinforced from a number of sources? The tasks of media strategy and planning have never been simple, and they have become more complex because of the rapid changes in the global media infrastructure during the last 15 years. These changes need to be examined before discussing the particular qualities of each available medium. The Changing Media Landscape The media buying scene is today characterized by the media independents, agencies that specialize in media. In some regards the evolution of advertising agencies has turned full circle.
In the UK Zenith Media3 is the largest media independent. Many advertising agencies that formerly bought media through in-house operations now buy their media space through independent media-brokers. Some have devolved their media function into a separate business, such as OMD UK4 (formerly called BMP Optimum), the media arm of DDB London. In some cases the media tail is even beginning to wag the advertising dog.
Media agencies are offering strategic planning services and creative work is being outsourced to specialist creative boutiques. This is a recent trend,5 but appears logically sound when one remembers how ad agencies evolved. As media become increasingly integral to the creative development of advertising, there may well be a major challenge ahead facing advertising agencies that want to retain their current structures and working methods. In the USA media agencies are even beginning to produce TV shows, so that advertisers have maximum control over the exposure their brand receives (see Chapter 6).
The rise of the independents has partly been a response to the changing media infrastructure which has been characterized by increasing media buying costs and technological advances. The rise in the cost of advertis- ing media, partly resulting from the monopoly position of many regional R2011046ch-05.qxd 1/1/2005 08:54 PM Page 109 Promotional Media 109 Figure 5.1 Socio-Economic Groupings in the UK. The socio-economic grouping system was devised by the British Civil Service in the late 1940s. It classified citizens according to the occupation of the ‘head’ (male) of the household because this criterion was a reliable indicator of all the household members’ level of education, income, professional class and leisure habits.
Today the socio-economic classification system is still used in British media, but its limitations are widely acknowledged. The categories were as follows. A Higher managerial, administrative and professional (3% of the UK population) B Intermediate managerial, administrative and professional (20.4%) C1 Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, admin and prof (27.8%) D Semi-skilled and unskilled manual (17.4%) E State pensioners, casual workers or unemployed (10.2%) media owners, has not been well-received by agencies. Media buyers therefore needed more buying power to generate economies of buying scale.
As a consequence there has been increased industrial concentration among media buyers parallel with that among media owners. Circulation of Printed Media The reduction in press production costs because of digital technology has resulted in many new newspaper and magazine titles coming on to the market, plus free newspapers, special sections in the press and a burgeoning number of specialist magazines. However, circulations, especially of the national daily newspapers and major magazines, are considerably lower than they were in the 1980s and early 1990s. For example, the national daily papers in the UK lost on average 10 per cent of their circulation between 1986 and 1993.6 This trend is also seen in other forms of press publications.
For example, between 1996 and 1998 there were 532 more magazine titles published in the USA, 1015 more in the UK, 128 more in China and the same in Japan. But circulations are shrinking; the UK’s popular title TV Times lost 180,000 readers from its circulation during the same period, and in the USA Women’s Journal and TV Guide lost 500,000 and 1 million readers respectively.7 Many more special-interest publications allow ever more precise targeting of advertising, but to smaller groups. Outdoor Media There is a global trend that more public space in urban and non-urban settings is being given over to advertising. Between 1996 and 1998 there were over 100,000 more outdoor sites in Europe.
In the USA there was a similar R2011046ch-05.qxd 1/1/2005 08:54 PM Page 110 110 Advertising and Promotion increase. It may be that changing geopolitical trends have undermined resistance to advertising in public social spaces. In a post-communist world the economic imperative of wealth generation has superseded other social values. The increase in ambient advertising assimilated into traditionally non-promotional social contexts such as bus or underground stations, pubs and bars and even schools has exploited this lowered resistance.
In general, advertising and promotion inserted into otherwise non-commercialized social settings has become much more common. Walls, floors and signage in public spaces all carry advertising, and the backs of theatre programmes, bus and car-park tickets are now rarely without sponsored messages. TV and Radio Digital telecommunications technology has lowered start-up costs and made possible not only many new magazine and newspaper titles but also many new TV and radio stations. In the UK in 1988 there were four TV channels.
Today there are over 100, with more being developed each year. As with magazines and newspapers, most TV channels carry lower view- ing figures than they did when there was less consumer choice. In the UK in the 1980s it was not uncommon for the most popular TV shows to attract viewing figures of over 20 million. Today it is exceptional for a show or televised event to attract more than 12 million viewers.
In contrast, in the USA the Superbowl American Football final can reach 100 million viewers, and advertising time In the many commercial breaks is the most expensive money can buy. New digital radio stations have made major inroads into the audience share of older stations. In the UK, the popular non-commercial BBC radio stations once attracted larger audiences, just like television. Today they have competition in the form of commercial, digital radio stations such as Classic FM, Heart FM and TalkSport, three stations that vie for the largest slice of advertising revenue.
These changes in the media landscape have major repercussions for advertisers. Conventional wisdom about the strategic importance of a particular medium and also about targeting, audience segmentation and cost-effectiveness has been challenged by these changes. Media strategy is increasingly relevant for the advertising strategy. Most importantly, account people and media planners can no longer easily categorize their target audience by external indicators like social class, age, income or sex.
Instead they have to think in terms of the lifestyle choices of brand consumption communities and the implications of these choices for media planning. New Media The increased pressure for cost-effectiveness of media buying has resulted in greater attention being paid to non-traditional media, especially those arising R2011046ch-05.qxd 1/1/2005 08:54 PM Page 111 Promotional Media 111 from new technology. ‘New media’ is still a term used in the business although most forms of new media are no longer new at all. It is now common for brand advertisers to set up a dedicated website, to offer a web-based retail interface, to target consumers with SMS text or multi-media messaging or to produce CD-Roms, DVDs or videos for publicity purposes.
Interactive television is another new medium with great marketing potential, but one that has so far proved less popular among TV viewers than the industry expected.