Benefits Of Using Television As An Advertisement Medium Are Discussed In This Essay." (70 Characters)

1). Complete the following selective T.V. buy using the attached avails sheet and the following criteria. You are to buy 125 GRPs weekly in the market of Calgary. You must use at least two stations. The weekly budget is $48,750.00 per week. CPRP=$390.00
W25-54, P/F ratio 60/40. The campaign length is April 25 x 8 weeks. Commercial length : 30 seconds. You may use 1x30 in each ½ hour program, and cannot use more than 2x30’s in each hour program. Make note of what is available on the attached avails sheet. M-F rotations would allow you to use 1 or 2 30’s per day depending on the length of the program. All discounts have been applied. You are required to put the packages together to achieve the stated criteria in the following format using excel. Be sure to provide a total rtg/audience and cost for each station as well as an overall cost rtg./audience delivery for the market, including overall CPR and CPM. Also state a P/F ratio for each station and overall.

2) Once the buy is complete write a pre-buy report for your client. This report should detail your overall achievement levels as it pertains to the initial objectives stated above. It should give details on why you chose the programs you did and what programs you had available to you but decided not to use and the reasons for this decision. This pre buy report should be at least one page in length.

3) Write a two-page report to your client on the benefits of using television as an advertising medium. What are its strengths and limitations and explain why television is a good form of mass communication to advertise various products and services?
Provide an analysis on the future of the television industry and the future of television as an advertising medium. Where do you see television in the future? Will it be able to sustain itself as an effective advertising medium?

Hint: Some of this information can be found on various web sites such as The Television Bureau (Thinktv.ca) and Strategy Magazine (Strategymag.com) Marketing Magazine (marketingmag.ca)
Broadcaster Magazine (broadcastermagazine.com)
 

Evolution of Television Advertising

The universal phenomenon of the television advertising landscape has been evolving at an unprecedented speed. My selection of the popular broadcast programs of the media channels operating in the city of Calgary, which is the largest and most populated city Alberta being populated by 1,237,656 persons, was based on the city’s strong economy, especially in categories related to personal wealth(Wolff, 2015). Calgary has been recognized for its high quality of life and analysts have been consistently ranking Calgary as the 5^th most liveable city of the world. This has been largely influenced by two main factors: (a) Media Fragmentation and (b) Population Shifts in Canada (Jaffe, 2005). 

Media fragmentation, which is often perceived as a hindrance by the majority of the media barons, has emerged as one of this industry’s greatest and strongest opportunities (See Table-1 in Annexure). This has been made possible by the availability of an increasing number of television channels for viewer consumption and this has allowed the marketers, such as Colgate-Palmolive, in connecting with their consumers in a big way through new avenues (Allen & Robinson (ed), 2009). This has also opened the minds of the target audiences who have been embracing new products because of the information being provided by the marketers through the ever-increasing television penetration (See Table-2 in Annexure) in the masses. Shifts in the population age are helping in the creation of a younger, diverse and tech-savvy consumer base. Identifying and using new avenues of reaching them is getting more complicated as the media is constantly expanding by offering large number of viewing options (Kelley, Sheehan & Jugenheimer, 2015). 

It is an indisputable fact that audiences are switching seamlessly across available platforms to view and then talk about their favourite shows. Research has shown that 86% of users of smartphone in Canada are using their devices as a second-screen while they are watching TV. This is one of the main criteria that I have concentrated more on variety in the programs selected, apart from their relevance to the products to be advertised (Plunkett (ed), 2008). My selection of the time-slots and the frequency of insertion of the advertisements has been based on the ‘three Rs’ – Reach, Resonance and Reaction. Analysis have confirmed the marketing effectiveness frameworks based on these three factors have proven to be simple yet powerful ways of understanding advertising performance (Shah, 2014). In order to achieving maximum effectiveness for the advertisements and to optimize audience delivery, brand lift and increasing sales impact, the viewing habits of intended audiences is another important factor considered for marketing the products as Colgate-Palmolive seeks to grow its businesses and reach new customers (Allen & Robinson (ed), 2009).

Media Fragmentation and Population Shifts in Canada

Write a two-page report to your client on the benefits of using television as an advertising medium. What are its strengths and limitations and explain why television is a good form of mass communication to advertise various products and services?  

Provide an analysis on the future of the television industry and the future of television as an advertising medium. Where do you see television in the future? Will it be able to sustain itself as an effective advertising medium?

Benefits of Using Television as an Advertisement Medium

Advertising on the television has been a popular mode of product promotion for all businesses, especially the large retailers who could afford the comparatively costly medium because of being a perfect mixture of audio-visual presentation (Wolff, 2015). It gained more momentum with the augment of the cable television era which not only lowered the production and broadcast costs, it also opened up an opportunity, for the marketer, of targeting the smaller, yet the most lucrative markets, thus making it not only a viable medium for small- to medium-sized businesses but also letting them promote their products at an affordable cost as well (See Table-3 in Annexure) (Jaffe, 2005). Television advertising not only allows the marketers to reach and address a wider audience base about their product, service and business, it also allows them to demonstrate live the benefits of their product / service. It offered a perfect opportunity of showing to the consumer how the product or service is useful and how it’s packaged so that the prospective customers know what to expect from the product / service (Kelley, Sheehan & Jugenheimer, 2015).  

Technically, in advertising, there are often multiple touch points for creating an effective influence on the consumers’ purchasing behaviour. This has also been established by a recent study of the Ball State University about the media consumption habits of average consumers in developed countries. Despite the steep rise in popularity of the Web over the last few years, television still remains the most dominant medium of infotainment in most households across the globe (Plunkett (ed), 2008). It has been successful in delineating the virtual boundaries dividing the nations as global viewership, across all sections of the society, is over four and a half hours a day, thus making watching of TV as one of the most common among the modern leisure activities. It is no wonder that advertising through the medium of television has emerged as the most powerful form of marketing across the world (Allen & Robinson (ed), 2009). 

Why Television is a Good Form of Mass Communication to Advertise Products and Services

Television advertising is the holy grail of success measurement of actual objectives of a business against campaigns of sales. Estimates tell that in the bygone year, Canadians had spent $675 billion in grocery purchase. How much of it was due to the ad affect? This can be gauged by the fact that nearly a million Canadians take to Twitter for discussing TV on any given day (Allen & Robinson (ed), 2009). Doesn’t this impact perceptions about brands? Experts agree that it does and they are also of the opinion that advertisement, especially those on television do have effect on what we buy. In the future, with techniques developing faster than thoughts, the advertisers, business houses and the media planners will not only be able to know about the marks they hit in terms of resonating with and reaching to the right audience, they will also be to gauge their sales targets achieved, get to know the shift in consumer attitudes and devise the desired action in a new show or a website for attaining the desired results for their products/services (Kelley, Sheehan & Jugenheimer, 2015). With consumers being bombarded with messages, Path to purchase products/services is no longer a straight line for consumers, looking at the daily heavy dose of messages being thrown at them. Hence, the media managers need to understand about the effects of ad exposure on the decision making process of the consumers for a better plan in the future (Shah, 2014).

It is a wrong notion to assume that the ‘commercial breaks’ on TV shows are Tweet breaks. Reports suggest that majority of viewers (70%) send their Tweets while watching the program rather than during the commercial break. In fact, these reports also suggest that the percentage of tweets sent during the program time versus the time of the commercials breaks was largely dependent on the percentage of commercial break time compared to the program’s airtime (Shah, 2014). There is hence a two-way relationship between TV ratings and Tweets. Reports suggest that live TV ratings created a greater impact on the viewer’s Twitter activity among nearly 50% of the programs telecast. The results have also shown that the tweets volume tends to cause a significant change in the live TV ratings almost in 30% of the telecasts (Jaffe, 2005). 73% of people who tweeted the TV tweets were tweeting about the brands they saw during the last commercial break and nearly 90% of the Tweets were about brands. Based on their results, the CPG marketers and other media companies measure and then improve the advertising performance through the accurate linking of the views of the consumers, what they watch or see or hear on television, web or on the radio, with what they eventually buy (Kelley, Sheehan & Jugenheimer, 2015). 

Touch Points in Advertising and the Dominance of Television Consumption Habits

About three decades ago, most of TV viewing was limited to the showing of only a few conventional TV channels. Growth of the cable industry opened up new avenues and most Canadians consumers were able to access some specialty channels which focused on niche interests, such as sports, food and history and the viewing became fragmented. But in the current context, in this new era of personal TV, the viewing pattern has changed very significantly: now it is on-demand, being split across devices and is been personalized through recommendations (Allen & Robinson (ed), 2009). Latest technology including the ‘Recommendation Engines’ is instrumental in increasing the exposure of the consumers to new and emerging shows and videos which the consumers prefer watching. This technology also lets the consumer control what they want to watch and what they do not want to watch (Allen & Robinson (ed), 2009). But the abundance of the content and the available platforms makes it difficult for the consumers to find what they want. This proves tiresome in some cases when a particular content may be left in obscurity unless it can be made discoverable. In this context, Canada lacks in a standard measurement system across-platforms, presently estimated measuring of viewing of the personalized TV is possible for about 1 in 10 of total TV viewing hours. But adoption of personalized TV cannot be the same for all, results show that young adults in English-speaking regions watch more personalized TV than the older generations and those living in the French-speaking regions (Plunkett (ed), 2008). 

Trend in TV advertising has so far been for slots of 60 and 30 second ad spots. A 60 second ad spot usually costs double of a 30 second ad spot. But the emerging trend is of 15 second ad spots which cost nearly 65% less than a 30 second ad spot. This can make the budget of the marketers go a long way, hence it is recommended that media planners suggest a mix of 30 and 15 second ad spots to their clients. The purpose of the 30 second ad spot should be to get across the message of the product/service, whereas the 15 second ad spot should be used for serving as a reminder of those products/services (Wolff, 2015). 

List of References 

Allen, G. and Robinson, D.J. (ed). 2009. Communicating in Canada's Past: Essays in Media History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Jaffe, J. 2005. Life after the 30-Second Spot. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. 

Kelley, L., Sheehan, K. and Jugenheimer, D.W. 2015. Advertising Media Planning: A Brand Management Approach. 4^th ed. Oxon: Routledge. 

Plunkett, J.W. (ed). 2008. Plunkett's Advertising & Branding Industry Almanac 2008. Houston: Plunkett Research, Ltd.

Shah, K. 2014. Advertising and Integrated Marketing Communications. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Education.

Wolff, M. 2015. Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age. New York: Penguin.