“More than 1,500 messages a day!”
That’s one estimate of how many advertisements are aimed at the average consumer. It boggles the mind!
Suppose it were only a tenth of that. The idea of even 150 messages (every day) is hard to comprehend. It is clear that how and when-and how often-you place your message is going to make a difference.
Nothing can be more important to the success of your advertising program than a thorough understanding of what media is and how it operates.
Why is understanding media so vital?
Because if you do not understand it, you cannot answer the key question you should always be asking about your advertising: Is it working? If you are not doing media right, your competition is probably getting calls from media sales people who have ideas on how to do it better.
Doing media right means making the best-informed decisions you can on where to spend your advertising rupees.
For many years the media categories have been newspapers, magazines, radio, television (broadcast, and more recently, cable), and out-of-home.
These categories are still your primary concern, but you should also be aware of the dramatic changes taking place in media. New technologies have broken up the established patterns by which these media reach their audiences. In the past, radio and television signals reached their audiences over the air waves, newspapers and magazines moved through the mail or were hand-delivered, cables carried nothing but telephone calls, and out-of-home advertising referred to those signs by the side of the road.
Now such distinctions are rapidly becoming out-of-date. Cables bring all kinds of video and audio channels into the home. And telephone cables now do more than simply carry voices from place to place. Through modems and phone lines, computers are downloading newspaper and magazine articles, which can be printed out o read off the screen. Television is found on airplanes and in the waiting rooms of everything from bus depots to auto dealers’ service departments. And out-of-home advertising is everywhere, from shopping carts to golf carts.
The fact is that the day of mass markets and mass audiences has gone. Audiences are splintered and segmented and fractionated. They read, listen to, and watch many media categories and countless media vehicles within the categories. Most of the media vehicles-individual, advertising media, such as a specific magazine or radio station-are narrowly targeted. You can take advantage of this to target your prospects and customers precisely.
Before you think about the specifics of planning and buying media, think about some broad principles. The people who are selling you media are selling intangibles. That is always a tough sale, and it makes for salespeople who are eager and insistent. Be sure they provide you with plenty of support for the decisions you have to make. The really smart media salesperson knows that he or she has a certain responsibility to help make your business successful. So he or she will contribute factual information about the audience and the market served by the particular media vehicle, to help you spend your advertising budget efficiently.
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