Media For Advertising

If you understand the concept that advertising is a multiplication of a selling conversation, then the basic ingredients of advertising media are easier to grasp. First, there must be an audience. A newspaper printed as a single copy could not function as an advertising medium unless the single copy were passed from person to person to create a worthwhile audience. (In that case, the advertiser probably could go from one individual to another and be more effective while reaching at least as many prospects in the same amount of time.) A potential advertiser will require evidence that an audience does exist, and will want to know the size and location of the audience, as well as other characteristics.

The second ingredient on which an advertising medium can be evaluated is its acceptance in the marketplace. Acceptance is related not only to the total number of customers in an audience, but also to the composition of that audience as compared to the target audience of the advertiser. Advertising over a closed circuit television program received only by occupants of nursing homes would not be very profitable for a real estate firm attempting to sell starter homes.

In addition to an audience's acceptance and size, the medium also must have a usable frequency of exposure. Most retailers and other local business establishments rely on their advertisements' reaching potential buyers regularly, some even several times daily. A medium with a once-a-year or even a once-a-month frequency might deserve nothing more than a very small part of a retailer's advertising budget. Remember, one way advertising functions is by repetition; a commercial message increases in audience awareness after more than one exposure.

Various advertising media will be examined from the standpoint of these three basic ingredients: the audience (coverage) each enjoys; the acceptance (impact) of the medium on the audience; and the ability to expand its initial impact by being available more than once or twice in a particular time frame (frequency).

Paid-circulation Newspapers

Almost every community has a newspaper. About 1,700 of the paid-circulation papers in America are daily papers and several thousand additional local papers are published weekly. Paid circulation means the audience reached pays to have the paper delivered to the home or pays a per copy price to pick it up at a newsstand or vending machine. Newspapers are the most popular advertising medium for most local businesses.

Today's newspaper no longer enjoys its former role as the almost exclusive source of news; that privilege applies only in those very few areas not served by radio or television. Newspapers remain, however, a strong factor in their sphere of influence. Below are some characteristics of paid-circulation newspapers that make them appealing to advertisers.

1. Most paid-circulation papers, both daily and weekly, reach the majority of homes in their primary city or town.

2. The size of the audience is easy to determine and verify.

3. The newspaper offers a predictable frequency of publication: once, twice or up to seven times a week.

4. Newspapers generally are bought by people representing all segments of the population. High- and low-income families, urban and suburban residents -- all are subscribers to the local newspaper.

5. Newspapers offer several options to advertisers. Large or small ads, words alone or words with graphics, black and white or color, news or specialized feature page positioning.

6. The printed advertising message has both permanence and desired obsolescence. A reader can refer back to or even clip and save your ad, yet tomorrow's edition is new and fresh and eagerly sought by the same reader.

7. The newspaper is the only medium in which the audience also advertise. The want ad or classified section of most newspapers serves as a local marketplace where individual buyers and sellers gather to trade their treasures and buy and sell each other's services.

8. Newspaper pasteup permits you to request special locations for ads that tie in with your market segments. Sports, business, society, food and news are the most common sections.

There are limitations to the newspaper as an advertising medium.

1. You could possibly miss potential customers who choose not to have the paper delivered.

2. Your advertising message must fight for the reader's attention. There may be hundreds of ads in one paper, as well as dozens of articles and features for the reader to spend time on. If the total time spent with a newspaper is only 20 minutes or so, as some surveys have found, you can see the odds against your one ad reaching a really significant number of subscribers.

3. To some advertisers, another limitation of newspapers is the time required to get the message into the reader's hand. The advertising deadline for some sections of large metropolitan papers may be one week or more in advance of publication date.

Advertising in newspapers is always priced by units of space. Rates for classified advertising may be priced per word or per line while display ads (the bordered ads that frequently contain illustrations as well as words) are usually priced per column inch or agate line. A column inch is a space one column wide by one inch deep. The agate line is 1/14th of a column inch. The cost of newspaper advertising is determined by the size of the circulation, the degree of the paper's dominance in the marketplace, and by the increasing costs of newsprint, ink, labor and transportation. The paid-circulation paper is the oldest of the mass media and continues to be the largest, as measured by volume of advertising dollars. It is used by industry giants as well as the corner drugstore. As a retailer or other small business owner, some of your advertising budget will most likely end up in your local paid-circulation newspaper.

Free-distribution Newspapers

Although far from new (the first newspapers in our country were distributed free), today's free-distribution paper is different from paid-circulation newspapers. Although the shopper type papers contain mostly advertising and little feature material, they remain a highly productive advertising medium in hundreds of cities and towns. Many of the earlier shoppers have grown into full-fledged newspapers with news, comics and features, and a frequency of delivery that approaches seven days a week. They offer the advertiser most of the advantages of paid-circulation papers, including the permanence of print, the versatility of color and graphics, and high readership of personal want ads. One advantage over paid-circulation papers is their ability to reach a very high percentage of the market area. Because they are free, they are delivered to every home. If readers like what they read, they soon come to depend on the paper. Studies show penetration and acceptance by more than 90 percent of the residents in the circulation area of free-distribution papers.

To verify the number of papers delivered, publishers of free-distribution papers may employ auditing firms to come into the delivery area and certify the number of copies printed, the number of carriers used and the number of households that regularly report receiving a paper. Many of these papers have audited proof of coverage approaching 100 percent of the homes in their markets.

The phenomenal growth of free-distribution papers in recent years is related to the increased sophistication of marketing and advertising technology. The computer made possible the measurement of sales in market share. Not only do today's merchandise movers target to sell more of their products each year, but also to sell them to ever larger shares of the total population in each area. Since daily and weekly paid newspapers often do not reach a substantial number of consumers, the total coverage concept of the free-distribution papers has proven they have outgrown their reputation as throwaways! Today, Sears, K-Mart, JC Penney and dozens of smaller department, discount, food and apparel chain organizations regularly use the free-distribution papers for total coverage of certain market areas.

Another growing function of the free-distribution papers is their ability to serve as the distribution vehicle for advertisers' own preprinted flyers, sections or merchandise catalogs. Many publishers will custom design for your special promotion a delivery system that will deliver the preprinted section to every home within a specified area, such as the 12 square blocks immediately surrounding your business.

If there is a free-distribution paper in your market area, it deserves an inquiry. Advertisements in it may prove to be the most effective dollar invested in your advertising budget.

Direct Mail

We would be remiss not to mention the U.S. Postal Service and its ability to deliver your advertising message. The direct mail advertising message can be highly personal and powerfully effective. You know how saturated your home mailbox is with nothing to buy contests giving you chances to win new houses, cars, world cruises and big checks for every month as long as you live. While there is no obligation for you to buy anything, there is always something available for sale -- subscriptions, books, records, videos, personal products, real estate -- usually at discounted prices. The giveaways are possible only because enough people are tempted by what is available, and what they buy can be traced to direct mail advertising. In almost every business there is an opportunity for increased business through intelligent use of direct mail advertising.

Because the per-piece cost of direct mail is much higher than most forms of print, it must be used carefully, selectively and efficiently. Mailing lists are difficult to prepare, expensive to buy and are partially obsolete the day after they have been completed. Because people die, move away or get mad at you at an alarming pace, keeping an accurate mailing list is not easy. Still, direct mail can be an efficient way to deliver a sales message to a specific target audience. If your audience is composed of doctors, lawyers, dentists or school teachers, for example, only direct mail offers you the chance to direct your ad to that target audience with no waste circulation. Direct mail also makes couponing and sampling practical. It can help isolate advertising response to one segment or another and compare returns in one area with those in another.

The most critical part of any direct mail program is the mailing list. Keep a list of all your customers, either by asking them to fill out a mailing list card or by taking their names off the checks you receive each day. Hold contests to get your customers to fill out an entry form. As your list grows, you may need to buy a computer or hire a mailing firm to keep the list current and to prepare mailing labels.

Magazines

Print media also include magazines. While most national magazines are not practical as an advertising medium for local businesses, some local magazines may be. City magazines are now published in hundreds of cities and towns. They may look as sophisticated as their national counterparts, and they are edited to local tastes. They use color, photography and professional writing and editing to create high-interest stories about people, places and things. They frequently are distributed free to certain people on special lists restricted to higher income families. In this way they can reach relatively exclusive audiences, but the frequency of publication (usually monthly) restricts their use as a basic medium.

Many regional and national magazines include classified ad sections that may be useful for promoting the availability of a catalog or for selling individual products. The advantage of magazines is that they have highly defined readerships that allow you to focus on specific market niches. If, for example, you run an ad in a boating magazine, you can be fairly sure the people who subscribe either own a boat or are looking for one. The Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS) publishes a complete listing of all the magazines that serve particular market interests; it is available in the business section of most libraries.

Brochures

For many small businesses, a printed brochure may be helpful to establish credibility and tell your story in more detail. Computer typesetting and laser printing have reduced the cost of producing a brochure. Free layout help is available at many copy centers. You can keep your costs down by using standard 8.5x11 inch paper and by using a triple-fold design that will fit into a standard business envelope.

Other Local Print Media

Don't overlook drop-point media such as booklets available for free pickup in high-traffic areas like convenience stores, banks and motels. These may include guides to local television programs, listings currently available from real estate firms, entertainment or sporting events. Evaluate each booklet on its ability to provide enough value to justify using it.

Radio

In America, 280 million people own more than 300 million radios! Only radio can take your advertising message to people while they ride bicycles, walk in the park, ride in cars or climb mountains. Radio brings a sense of urgency to its listeners that is second to none. Contrary to the predictions of doom during the advent of television, radio is alive and well today, and radio advertising is a major part of the plan for advertisers of every size and description.

In its pre-television days, radio was the national advertisers' most economical way to communicate with millions at a time. Syndicated programs of music, drama and news were a common part of the American life-style. With the advent of television, radio moved to the automobile and the beach. Along came the transistor and radio moved to the shirtpocket. Today radio is everywhere. Millions awake to the sound of clock radios, and for many the radio is the last sound they hear before going to sleep. How can a small business use this sound-only medium for effective advertising? Only by understanding it and capitalizing on its strengths.

Today's radio station is judged on its effectiveness not only by the number of its listeners, but also who those listeners are. Many of today's stations have positioned themselves to reach a selective audience instead of a total market. In one marketplace, one station may play only country-western music, another rock music, a third only religious music, while others feature 24-hour news broadcasts or talk shows. As an advertiser, format programming allows you to buy advertising on stations whose listener characteristics most closely coincide with the profile of your firm's customers. Buying time on a given station also can help you reach audience segments that you may want to target to help expand your firm's total market segment.

Radio advertising is sold on the basis of time. That time can vary from an entire program, which includes your commercial announcements, to spot announcements ranging from 10 to 60 seconds. Price ranges are higher during drive time (the hours in the morning and evening when the maximum number of people are in their cars going to or from work, school or other daytime activities) and lower during the time when more people are watching television. Most stations offer package rate plans with a specified number of commercials guaranteed within a particular time slot. Also, consider buying flights of commercials, i.e., an intense saturation of 30-second or 1-minute spots in a relatively short period of two or three weeks. Repeat this flight technique during key promotional times of the year.

The sounds you can employ on radio include not only the monologue of a man's or woman's voice, but dialogue and dramatic conversations, vocal and instrumental music, and sound effects of every imaginable nature, used individually or in combinations. The size of radio's audience, like the circulation of newspapers, is audited by independent organizations and available to advertisers through station sales representatives. Arbitron, one of the auditing firms, conducts its survey by having a sample number of households keep a written diary of the radio listening habits of each occupant during a predetermined period (usually one week). Arbitron then summarizes the various stations' listeners by time of day in 15-minute segments by sex and age of listener. An advertiser can use the Arbitron data to select the station or stations that best cover the desired target audience.

Radio advertising frequency is as high as you can afford. Many stations now broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The number of commercial minutes any station can air in each segment of programming is limited by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but there is still the opportunity to have a message repeated frequently in any given period. It is also possible to have the radio station come to your business for a remote broadcast with customer interviews, prize giveaways and other crowd-drawing techniques.

Television

Watching TV is the most common leisure activity in our country today; many surveys report average daily television viewing time as high as five or six hours. It is no wonder it has grown into a giant advertising medium. Television always has been a popular medium for large retailers, but its effective use by small- and medium-size businesses is becoming more popular because of lowered production costs and the ability of cable TV to reach smaller market areas.

The power of television is its ability to appeal not only to sight and hearing simultaneously, but also to strengthen that appeal by the dimensions of movement and the realism of full color. If you have invented a new product, TV advertising can show and tell many people about it and actually show them the benefit of ownership. Since they saw how it works and the package it comes in, customers will recognize it when they are at the store and be psychologically reminded of how it works and how great it would be to have it. If the hammer had never been invented until you came along, just imagine the number of words in print advertising it would take to equal the effectiveness of a 60-second television spot during which a hammer pounded a nail to fasten one piece of wood to another!

Television advertising is sold by the time the message takes. There may be additional charges for writing, talent, props, on-location filming, music and editing. Audience loyalty is a disadvantage in TV advertising. The audience tunes to a given channel for entertainment they know they will find at a particular time. If a football game, popular movie or some other preferred form of entertainment appears on another channel, the viewer does not hesitate to change channels without leaving the couch. While viewers are loyal to the entertainment value of television, they show very little loyalty to the station itself, especially as cable can bring 40 to 50 viewing alternatives into the home. Viewers, however, do tend to have favorite news, weather and sports telecasting personalities, which can influence the size of your audience and its consistency during certain time periods.

Other developments that could affect television advertising are the availability of many different stations through cable companies, all-shopper channels, all-sports channels, all-news stations, the use of home television screens as monitors for in-home computer and game systems, and the popularity of video movie cassettes. All of these may reduce the size of the audience a television station can guarantee its advertisers.

Many rating services measure the size of television audiences. National programs are measured daily and a station's audience size can be estimated fairly well. Your local television representative can explain television's penetration within the station's area of dominant influence (ADI) and how that area may conform to your firm's trade area.

Outdoor Media

Despite restrictive legislation, billboards and other outdoor display signs still perform a strong advertising task in many areas. Instant communication is the key to successfully using billboards. Directed at drivers with only split seconds to divert their eyes and to passengers who can at best get a fleeting glance, wordy or complex messages are worthless. Photos or striking art combined with a firm name and a one- or two-word headline or slogan are common.

Audience totals are determined by how many sign locations you buy and the total traffic passing each sign. Outdoor advertising is usually sold on a basis of gross rating point (GRP) evaluation. The GRP of any medium is the number of persons exposed to a message compared to the total number of persons that make up the market. One shortcoming is that the same person may drive by the same billboard three or four times a day and be counted as four separate people. Your local outdoor sales representative can explain how many locations are necessary for you to achieve 50, 75 or 100 gross rating points, and what that exposure will cost you over varying time periods.

Other Media for Advertising

We could spend considerable time just trying to complete a list of all the other ways a business can advertise and probably still leave some out. Pencils and pens with your firm's name imprinted, skywriting, business cards and even sandwich boards all can perform an effective advertising role for some advertisers. You must evaluate each one on its ability to get your sales message to the maximum number of prospects in a believable manner and at a reasonable price. No textbook or consultant can do the job for you. After you have read and listened, go to your local media representatives and ask for their help. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose by putting your firm's best interest ahead of their desire to make a sale.