What Is Media?

Media help fulfill two basic needs—they inform and they entertain.

The media also affect our lives through their entertainment function. Television situation comedies such
as All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore not only reflected what was happening in U.S. society in the
1970s, but also helped to influence attitudes and behaviors concerning the issues of race and equality.

What Media Are Out There?

The world of media can be very broadly divided into two types—print and electronic. Print media
include magazines and newspapers, whereas electronic media cover radio, television and the Internet.

Other media types are not quite as easily categorized. Thus outdoor billboards are generally defined as a
print medium, whereas out-of-home options such as transit ads, or stadium signage, are variously
classified as nontraditional, alternative, or ambient media.

They are designed to sell products to customers. Of course, there are also media that convey
information but are not commercial in intent. Consumer Reports is a magazine that does not carry any
advertising.

The white pages of the telephone directory, web search engines, and airline safety instructions are all
informative yet are not advertisements in and of themselves.

Even novels are not immune. A popular British author wrote Bulgari Jewelers into her fictional story, in
2000, for which the company paid her.

The generic term media (or medium in the singular) means different things to different people. To Joe
Smith sitting at home on a Friday evening, the “media” mean whatever TV shows he watches or
magazines he leafs through. For the local Chevy car dealer, the media provide a way to advertise this
week’s deals on Impalas and Blazers.

Strictly speaking, a “medium” may be defined as a means by which something is accomplished,

conveyed, or transferred.

Media Versus Communications

In the business world, we think of a medium as a way to transfer and convey information about goods or
services from the producer to the consumer, who is a potential buyer of that item.

Today, most agencies look for integrated ways to make contact with consumers, perhaps including
traditional advertising in Friends on TV, sponsoring a blimp flying over a popular beach in the summer,
and putting the brand’s message on coffee cup holders in Starbucks. The goal of these disparate efforts
is to surround the target audience with a holistic campaign that presents them with the same message
about the brand in various creative ways.

The Role of Media in Consumers’ Lives

As our lives grow increasingly busy and demanding, and as technology moves ahead with ever more
sophisticated ways to improve our lives, it seems that the media are playing a more and more important
role in what we do, where we go, or how we behave. many of us wake up to the sound of the clock
radio; we read the newspaper while watching morning television and eating breakfast; and we connect
to our offices via e-mail and the Internet.

The role of media in conveying information through advertising messages is not something consumers
generally consider. Indeed, when they do think about it they are likely to complain about being
inundated by commercial messages! Yet despite the fact that no one has yet proven “how advertising
works,” businesses continue to believe in its power, as evidenced by the $244 billion spent in this
country on advertising in 2000.

How Media Work With Advertising

Advertising in the media performs the dual role of informing and entertaining. It informs us of the goods
and services that are available for us to purchase and use. And, along the way, it often entertains us with
some humorous, witty, or clever use of words and pictures.

Media advertising also performs another vital function. It helps offset the cost of the media
communication itself to consumers, for eg FB isn’t free. If we did not have commercials on television or
radio, the cost of programming would have to come through sponsorships, taxes, or government
monies. Public broadcasting in the United States derives most of its income through semiannual pledge
drives, during which viewers and listeners are asked to give money to pay for the services. Government
funding provides additional revenues. But even here, more and more public broadcasting television
stations are accepting restricted forms of paid commercials as long as they are image oriented and not
hard-sell. Indeed, there is even a network available, Public Broadcasting Marketing, to help advertisers
place their spots on public TV stations across the country.

Tasks in Media
The broad field of advertising media can be broken down into three primary tasks:

• Planning how best to use media to convey the advertising message to the target consumer (the
media planner).
• Buying media space and time for the message (the media buyer).
• Selling that space or time to the advertiser (the media seller).

Most large companies handle the media planning and buying functions through an advertising agency.
Smaller firms will usually handle this task themselves, through their marketing director, or public
relations coordinator.

The role of the planner is to decide where and when the message should be placed, how often, and at
what cost.

The plan is then implemented by the media buyer, who negotiates with the media providers themselves
to agree on the space and time needed and to determine or confirm where the ad will appear. That
buyer will, of course, be dealing with the salesperson at the media company, whose job it is to sell as
much advertising space or time as possible.
 Chapter#2
Media in the Marketing Context
Both media and advertising are part of the bigger picture of the world of marketing

The primary goal of marketing is to increase sales and profits.

In marketing jargon, these four critical elements are known as the “Four P’s”: Product, Price, Place
(distribution), and Promotion. Although your job as a media specialist does not necessarily involve
making the decisions on all of these criteria, it is critical that you have a clear understanding of how they
work and, more importantly, how they can impact the media decisions and strategy.

There are several key channels of communication: advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, direct
marketing, event marketing, and publicity. All can be thought of as media, or ways of conveying
information to potential buyers.

Almost any decision you make concerning media will have an impact on something else in the marketing
mix. For example, if you decided to advertise on network television, you would have to ensure that your
product was in fact available throughout the country. Or if you chose to concentrate your advertising
efforts during holiday periods (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and so on), you might consider lowering
your price at that time to boost sales even further.

The task of the media planner is to consider all of the marketing information available on the product
and use that information to determine how best to reach the target audience through advertising
media.

In this way, the media plan can be thought of as the pivot point, or hub, of the overall marketing plan

Getting to Know the Consumer

One of the most important pieces of information that marketing can provide for you as a media
specialist is an understanding of how your consumers view and use your product or service.

The product category could either be defined as all brands of tomato soup, or all kinds of soup. In the
case of a service, such as insurance, the product category could be one type of insurance, such as life or
home or auto, or all types.

What we need to know as marketers and media specialists, however, is how the consumer decides
which brands and products to buy, as well as the process he or she goes through when purchasing an
item.
Understanding these decision processes will help you decide which media might best be used both to
reach your target and convey the desired message at the right time.

In looking at how consumers use brands, we must answer several key questions: How much do
consumers already know about the brand (brand and advertising awareness)? And when, where, and
how often do they buy it (purchase dynamics)?

What do consumers know about the brand

And although we talk about “great” ads that we saw on television last night, or read in a newspaper or
magazine, we are probably unlikely to remember the brand which was being advertised.

How the Media Specialist Gets to know consumers:

Finding out how aware your consumers are of your brand and its advertising is quite straightforward,
although not without pitfalls. The easiest way to do this is through a survey (mail, telephone, or in
person), in which you simply ask people what they remember about certain ads. You can do this in one
of two ways—either unaided, where no prompts or assistance are provided, or aided, where you offer
some kind of memory aid, such as mentioning something from the advertisement or giving an actual list
of brand names and asking for further information on the advertising.

There are other issues to keep in mind with brand-awareness research. The most important is that you
cannot expect complete accuracy.

If you want to probe further into people’s responses, you can find out more through focus groups, which
are groups of 5 to 10 people who are interviewed together by a moderator.

A newer, more in-depth technique for understanding consumers, at least in the marketing world, is the
use of ethnography. Developed in sociology and anthropology, the technique involves close observation
of what consumers are doing. This may include visiting their homes to watch them prepare a meal (for a
brand like Kraft salad dressing) or spending a few hours with them in the gym (for a brand like Nike). The
idea is to see up close how the brand or product category really fit into people’s lives.

The Consumer Decision Process:

Many research studies have been conducted over the years to demonstrate the decision process that a
consumer typically goes through when buying a routine product. In its simplest form, this process has
three steps:

1. Think.
2. Feel.
3. Do.

We can break these three stages down further, coming up with eight stages the consumer goes through
in buying a product or service. These are:

1. Need.
2. Awareness.
3. Preference.
 4. Search.
5. Selection.
6. Purchase.
7. Use.
8. Satisfaction.
Of course, in reality, life isn’t always as simple. There are occasions (and products) where people think
about a product, buy it, and only at that point do they develop attitudes toward it. This is especially true
for new product launches, where consumers have not had a chance to develop emotional bearings for
the brand or category.
Another point to keep in mind is that the decision process can sometimes get stalled at a stage before
purchase. In our Student Stuff example, students may be made aware of the catalog, decide that they’d
like to buy an item from it, but be unable to find the web site to make the purchase, and give up. Or they
could get a copy of the catalog, look through its contents, and decide they actually prefer getting their
books from Borders or Barnes & Noble.

How the consumer buys Products

So in addition to looking at awareness, or the top of the decision tree, you should also pay attention to
what is happening at the bottom of the tree, with the purchase cycle.
• When are people buying your product?
• How much is bought?
• Is there some kind of seasonality to their purchases?
All of this information will prove to be critical in planning and buying your media, and will have a major
impact on how and when you schedule your ads.

When do People Buy?

The answer to this question is more complex than it seems at first. You might say, “Well, they buy my
product all the time.” But if you look more closely at purchase behavior you will probably detect some
kind of pattern. Although people are buying houses “all the time,” they are more likely to do so when
interest rates are low and prices are depressed. People buy cars “all the time,” but sales increase when
the new models come into the showrooms in the fall. And more sales occur in the second half of the
month than in the first.
Sales of cheese are higher at the weekends and around paydays because that is when people have more
money to go shopping. Moving companies are busiest between May and October because that is when
most people change their residence.
Sales of cheese are higher at the weekends and around paydays because that is when people have more
money to go shopping. Moving companies are busiest between May and October because that is when
most people change their residence.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith might buy a new Carrier air conditioner in July, they will probably start to think
about which one to get several months prior to that. This provides you with a valuable opportunity to
get your brand’s message to the Smiths early in their decision-making process.

How Much do they Buy?

The size of consumer purchases is another important element of the purchase cycle for the media
specialist to know.

That is, what proportion of your brand’s sales comes from each size of the product?
This kind of information is not only important for production and distribution purposes it can also play a
key role in your media planning, for the users of each size are likely to be different kinds of people, with
different media habits.

The casual drinker who picks up the individual can is more likely to be a working professional female
who is married, college educated, and living in the north central region of the country, whereas those
who purchase the plastic bottles are more likely to be parents and to live in the south (see Exhibit 2.3,
on page 18). Young working women prefer to watch programs such as The West Wing and Friends, and
read Cosmopolitan and Glamour; older adults are more likely to choose 60 Minutes and Reader’s Digest.
Based on these differences in media preference, you may well end up with two media plans, one for the
occasional purchaser of the single can, and another for the frequent user who consumes several plastic
bottles per week.

Looking at the Marketplace:

Once you know about how consumers view and use your brand, the next step for the media specialist is
to examine what has been happening to that brand in the marketplace in recent times.

Given this information on past efforts to sell your product, you can decide whether to continue along
the same path or try something different in terms of your media planning and buying.

Examining the marketplace involves doing an analysis of historical data on both the brand and the
product category.

What are The Competitors Up to?

In doing a historical analysis of the brand you must also deal with competitive issues. That is, you should
not only explore and uncover as much marketing and media information as possible about your own
brand, but you also need to do the same for all the brands against which you do or plan to compete. The
marketing part of these issues may be divided into three main areas:

• Product category trends.

• Brand trends and share of market.
• Brand’s share of requirements.

Product category trends.

If you are creating a media plan for the manufacturer of a Cannondale mountain bike, you would want
to know whether sales of bicycles are increasing, decreasing, or flat. That will immediately influence
your media budget, who you choose to target, and how you go about trying to reach them.

How you define your product category will determine not only your assessment of the strengths or
weaknesses of that category, but also the direction and potential marketing and media strategies you
employ for your particular brand.

To take the software example, if you decide it is part of the general software category, you might want
to send direct mail to people who have registered their own software and indicated they have children
in the household. As a children’s product, however, you will probably do consumer advertising in
parenting books such as Child magazine.
Once you have determined to which product category your brand rightfully belongs (or the category to
which you wish it to belong), you are then in a position to examine trends in that category. You can do
this in one of several ways.

You may have access to product category sales from a trade association or manufacturers’group of some
kind (such as the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association if you are marketing children’s toys, or
the Electronics Industry Association if you are marketing electronics sales). You can often find such data
in trade journals in your particular field (such as Supermarket News for supermarket food sales or
Chemical Week for sales of liquid nitrogen). One invaluable source for this type of information is the
journal Sales and Marketing Management, which comes out several times a year with overall category
sales. Advertising Age also produces an advertising-to-sales ratio in all major product categories annually
that shows spending on advertising relative to sales (see Exhibit 2.4). In many larger companies, these
data are routinely collected, usually within the marketing department.

Intepreting Sales Trends. Four factors that help explain sales trends are economic, social, political, and
cultural trends.

Cultural changes, although slower to occur, can also explain movements in product sales that have
implications for media planning and buying. This is seen in the growth of ethnic foods, such as Mexican
or Chinese dishes.

Finally, social changes, which also tend to happen slowly, can ultimately have a major impact on media
activities. The cigarette companies of today have a much tougher job selling their product than they did
20 or 30 years ago, primarily because smoking is no longer considered socially acceptable due to the
proven health risks it carries.

Brand Trends:

When you turn your attention to individual brands, you perform analyses similar to those done at the
category level. This time, however, you focus your attention on specific brand names. The use of the
plural here is critical: You are not just looking at how your brand has been doing over the past several
years, but even more importantly, you need to track how your brand’s competitors have been faring
during that same period.

This requires finding the answers to the following questions:

• How many competitors are there?

• How many of these are major, and how many minor?
• How is the category characterized? Is it an oligopoly, where 3 or 4 brands define the category, or
are there 20 or 30 brands each shouting to be heard?
• How aggressively do the brands in this category compete against one another?

For each competitor (ideally for all of them, but at least for the major ones), you must also find out
the following:

 What is the company’s financial position?

 How does the competitor position its brand?
 How does the competitor promote its brand?
 Which media are used?
  How much does the competitor spend to promote its brand?
 Where and when does it spend it money?

Share of Market
Once you have looked at the trends for your brand and its competitors, you must then put that
information together and see how your brand is faring in the marketplace.

The percentage of total category sales that your brand enjoys is known as the market share.

It could be that you have been losing market share, but so have your major competitors, because of the
entry of several new brands into the category.

Where Is Your Brand Sold?

Once you have found out as much as possible about how your brand stacks up against the competition,
you need to think about geographic and distribution considerations.

Specifically, you must look at where your brand is selling well and where it is doing poorly both in terms
of markets, regions, or states, and in terms of type of retail outlet.

What you discover by looking at the sales for your brand in these ways may lead you to develop a media
plan with regional or local differences.

So marketers are customizing their marketing and media plans (and, in some cases, their products) to
meet the needs of specific areas of the country.

To understand geographic skews, the media specialist can turn to two pieces of information:

• Development indices.
• Market share.

Development indices:
You could, in theory, obtain sales data from every region or store in the country and look through them
to find out your brand’s sales picture. But a more efficient method for analyzing geographic strengths
and weaknesses is to look at how the product category is doing across the United States and then how
the brand is developing over time. Both of these are calculated by using developmental indices.

Category Development Index. The category development index, or CDI, looks at product category sales
in each potential region or market.
Numbers below 100 indicate the category has lower than average sales in a given region, whereas those
above 100 suggest sales of the category are greater than the national average in a certain part of the
country. If, on average, 30,000 tractors are sold per month per region across the United States, that
might mean 25,000 units are sold in the East, 45,000 in the West, and 33,000 in the South. Eastern sales
would index at 83 (25,000/30,000), meaning that sales in that area are 17% below the national norm,
whereas sales in the West would have a CDI of 150 (45,000/30,000), indicating that that region’s sales
are 50% higher than average. Those in the South have a CDI of 110 (33,000/30,000), which shows that
southern sales are 10% higher than the norm.
Brand Development Index. You should not rely solely on the CDI in making geographic media
decisions, however. You also need to look at how your brand stacks up against other brands in the cate
gory. One tool for this job is the brand development index, or BDI.
The calculation is very similar to that of the CDI. You calculate a norm, or average, for all brands (or chief
competitors) in the category, which is again set at 100, and then see how your own brand is doing in
comparison. The John Deere tractor company might find its BDI for tractor sales is 10% above average in
the eastern region and 5% below the norm in the West, suggesting that it is doing better than other
brands in the category in the East, but slightly less well in comparison in the West.
When you look at the BDI, you need to keep the CDI in mind too. Once you have these two sets of data,
you should compare your BDI to your CDI. In that way you will be able to find those markets where your
brand is doing better than the category overall and, conversely, where your brand appears to be
underperforming the category
 McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory
Media, Society and Culture: Connections and Conflicts
Mass communication can be considered as both a ‘societal’ and a ‘cultural’
phenom-enon. The mass media institution is part of the structure of society, and
its techno-logical infrastructure is part of the economic and power base, while the
ideas, images and information disseminated by the media are evidently an
important aspect of our culture (in the sense defined above).
In discussing this problem, Rosengren (1981b) offered a simple typology which
cross-tabulates two opposed propositions: ‘social structure influences culture’;
and its reverse, ‘culture influences social structure’.

Media–Society Theory I: the Mass Society

The theory emphasizes the interdependence of institutions that exercise
power and thus the integration of the media into the sources of social
power and authority. Content is likely to serve the interests of political and
eco-nomic power holders. The media cannot be expected to offer a critical
or an alternative definition of the world, and their tendency will be to assist
in the accommodation of the dependent public to their fate.
The ‘dominant media’ model sketched above reflects the mass society view.
Mass society theory gives a primacy to the media as a causal factor. It rests
very much on the idea that the media offer a view of the world, a substitute
or pseudo-environment, which is a potent means of manipulation of people
but also an aid to their psychic sur-vival under difficult conditions.
Mass society is, paradoxically, both ‘atomized’ and centrally controlled. The
media are seen as significantly contributing to this control in societies
characterized by large-ness of scale, remoteness of institutions, isolation of
individuals and lack of strong local or group integration.
Although the expression ‘mass society’ is no longer much in vogue, the idea
that we live in a mass society persists in a variety of loosely related
components. These include a nostalgia (or hope) for a more
‘communitarian’ alternative to the present individualistic age as well as a
critical attitude towards the supposed emptiness, loneliness, stress and
consumerism of life in a contemporary free-market society. The seemingly
widespread public indifference towards democratic politics and lack of
participation in it are also often attributed to the cynical and manipulative
use of mass media by politicians and parties.
The actual abundance and diversity of many old and new forms of media
seem, however, to undermine the validity of mass society theory in its
portrayal of the media as one of the foundation stones of the mass society.
In particular, the new electronic media have given rise to an optimistic vision
of what society can become that runs counter to the central mass society
thesis.
his chal-lenges not just the economic power of old media but also their
guaranteed access to large national audiences at the time of their own
choosing. There is a darker side tothis vision, however, since the Internet
also opens up new means of control andsurveillance of the online
population and is not immune to control by media conglom-erates.
Media–Society Theory II: Marxism and
Political Economy
While Karl Marx only knew the press before it was a true mass medium, the
tradition of Marxist analysis of the media in capitalist society is still of some
relevance. There have been several variants of Marxist-inspired analysis of
modern media, merging into the present-day ‘critical political economy’
(Murdock and Golding, 2005).
The question of power is central to Marxist interpretations of mass media.
While varied, these have always emphasized the fact that ultimately they
are instruments of control by and for a ruling class.
Marxist theory posits a direct link between economic ownership and the
dissemina-tion of messages that affirm the legitimacy and the value of a
class society. These views are supported in modern times by evidence of
tendencies to great concentration of media ownership by capitalist
entrepreneurs (e.g. Bagdikian, 1988; McChesney, 2000) and by much
correlative evidence of conservative tendencies in content of media so
organized (e.g. Herman and Chomsky, 1988).
Revisionist versions of Marxist media theory in the twentieth century
concen-trated more on ideas than on material structures. They emphasized
the ideological effects of media in the interests of a ruling class, in
‘reproducing’ the essentially exploitative relationships and manipulation,
and in legitimating the dominance of capitalism and the subordination of the
working class.
Political-economic theory is a socially critical approach that focuses primarily
on the relation between the economic structure and dynamics of media
industries and the ideological content of media. From this point of view, the
media institution has to be considered as part of the economic system, with
close links to the political system.
The consequences are to be observed in the reduction of independent
media sources, concentration on the largest markets, avoidance of risks, and
reduced investment in less profitable media tasks (such as investigative
reporting and documentary film-making). We also find neglect of smaller
and poorer sectors of the potential audience and often a politically
unbalanced range of news media.
The political economy approach is now being applied to the case of the Internet. Fuchs (2009) builds on
Smythe’s ideas in suggesting that the key to the Internet economy lies especially in the commodification
of the users of free access platforms which deliver targets for advertisers and publicists as well as often
providing the con-tent at no cost to networks providers and site-owners. In the case of very popular
websites such as Myspace and YouTube,the distinction from mass communication is not very clear.
The relevance of political-economic theory has been greatly increased by several trends in media
business and technology (perhaps also enhanced by the fall from grace of a strictly Marxist analysis).
First, there has been a growth in media concen-tration worldwide, with more and more power of
ownership being concentrated in fewer hands and with tendencies for mergers between electronic
hardware and soft-ware industries (Murdock, 1990; McChesney, 2000; Wasko, 2004). Secondly, there
has been a growing global ‘information economy’ (Melody, 1990; Sussman, 1997), involving an
increasing convergence between telecommunication and broadcasting. Thirdly, there has been a decline
in the public sector of mass media and in direct public control of telecommunication (especially in
Western Europe), under the ban-ner of ‘deregulation’, ‘privatization’ or ‘liberalization’ (McQuail and
Siune, 1998; van Cuilenburg and McQuail, 2003). Fourthly, there is a growing rather than diminishing
problem of information inequality. The expression ‘digital divide’ refers to the ine-quality in access to
and use of advanced communication facilities (Norris, 2002), but there are also differences in the quality
of potential use. The essential propositions of political-economic theory (see Box 4.9) have not changed
since earlier times, but the scope for application is much wider (Mansell, 2004).