uld increase sales via a different target audience.analyze the market situation to identify the potential avenues for boosting sales increase and consider how advertising might achieve those aims. If the advertiser chooses to attract competitors 'customers - like what Sprint does to attract users of other wireless services - the media plan will need to define the target audience to be brand switchers and will then identify reasons to give those potential switchers to switch, such as greater convenience, lower cost, or additional plan features. For example, in 2006 Sprint Nextel ran an ad campaign urging consumers to switch to Sprint because no one has a more powerful network.
Communication Goals
After media planners define the target audience for a media plan, they set communication goals: to what degree the target audience must be exposed to (and interact with) brand messages in order to achieve advertising and marketing objectives. For example, one communication goal can be that 75 percent of the target audience will see the brand in television commercials at least once during a period of three months. Another communication goal is that 25 percent of the target audience will form a preference for a new brand in the first month of the brand launch. The different communication goals can be better understood in a hierarchy of advertising objectives, such as Bill Harvey's expansion of an earlier model of Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). [18] expanded ARF model has ten levels, as shown in Figure 1. The first three levels of goals from the bottom - vehicle distribution, vehicle exposure, and advertising exposure - are particularly relevant for media planning. Vehicle distribution refers to the coverage of a media vehicle, such as the number of copies that a magazine or newspaper issue has, or the number of households that can tune in to a given television channel. Vehicle exposure refers to the number of individuals exposed to the media vehicle, such as the number of people who read a magazine or watched a television program. Advertising exposure refers to the number of individuals exposed an ad or a commercial itself.is important to note the difference between vehicle exposure and advertising exposure for many media with editorial content. For example, not all audience members of a television program will watch all the commercials interspersed in the program. A study shows that only 68 percent of television audiences watch the commercials in television programs. [19] Vehicle exposure represents only an opportunity to see an ad, not necessarily that the ad has actually been seen. In reality, advertising exposure is rarely measured, and media planners use vehicle exposure as a proxy measure of advertising exposure.group of communication goals is advertising recall, advertising persuasion, leads and sales. Advertising recall represents the cognitive effect of the ad, advertising persuasion represents the emotional effect of the ad, and leads and sales are the behavioral effects of the ad. Each can be specified in a media plan as a communication goal. For example, a communication goal can specify that 50% of the target audience will recall the radio ad during the month of the campaign, or that a campaign will generate 3000 leads.
.2 Media Strategies
Media planners make three crucial decisions: where to advertise (geography), when to advertise (timing), and what media categories to use (media mix). Moreover, they make these decisions in the face of budget constraints. The actual amount of money that an advertiser spends on marketing communications can vary widely, from billions of dollars for multinational giants such as Procter amp; Gamble, to a few thousand dollars for local mom-n-pop stores. In general, companies spend as little as 1% to more than 20% of revenues on advertising, depending on the nature of their business. Regardless of the budget, some media options are more cost effective than others. It is the job of media planners to formulate the best media strategies - allocating budget across media categories, geographies, and time. Let's look at each of these three decisions in turn, and then consider cost effectiveness.
Media Mix Decisions
Which media should the advertiser use? Media planners craft a media mix by considering a budget-conscious intersection between their media objectives and the properties of the various potential media vehicles. That is, they consider how each media vehicle provides a cost-effective contribution to attaining the objectives, and then they select the combination of vehicles that best attain all of the objectives.making media mix decisions, planners look to a whole spectrum of media, not just to tradi...
