Newspapers as an Advertising Medium

In the last nearly 200 years, newspapers have remained a very important mass media for advertising. With the appearance of radio, and subsequently television, there has been some change in the reading habits of people. TV presented a combination of some very desirable characteristics, not offered by any other media, and became a primary source of entertainment, news, and other types of information for a very large number of people. Print media has successfully met the challenge posed by television because it has certain advantages not offered by broadcast media. In spite of tremendous popularity of TV as an advertising medium, newspapers command a position of significance among advertisers.… Read the rest

Advantages and Disadvantages of Radio Advertising

Radio has undergone considerable changes in the past nearly twenty five years. It used to be the premier mass medium for audiences and advertisers. Radio can deliver ad messages to a very large number of audiences across the length and breadth of a particular geographic area.

Advantages of Radio Advertising

Radio offers a variety of features to advertisers and many of the medium’s characteristics seem to be important to advertisers. Of all the mass media, radio is believed to be the most personal medium and offers advantages over other media like selectivity, cost efficiency, flexibility and mental imagery.

  1. Selectivity: Radio offers a high degree of selectivity through geographic coverage by a large number of stations and various programme formats.
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Disadvantages of Television Advertising

Television advertising does have some disadvantages as well. Some of the limitations of television advertising are:

  • Costs: Though television offers unsurpassed creativity and reaches large audiences, it is an expensive medium to advertise. Besides the high cost of media time, the cost of producing good quality commercials is quite high. Besides the airtime costs, considerable costs were involved in producing that the commercial. Even local ads can be expensive to produce and often are not of high quality. High costs associated with TV advertising discourage small budget companies.
  • Lack of Selectivity: Advertisers, who are interested in delivering their message to a very specific, narrowly defined, often small, target audience, find that TV leads to overexposure, reducing its cost effectiveness.
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Advertising Through Television Broadcast

Television is believed to be the most authoritative, ideal, influential and exciting medium for advertising, because of its ability to combine visual images, sound, motion and color.

Television is not a homogenous medium and reaches a variety of audiences. It is a constant companion to some users, to others it is a source of news or occasional entertainment. It is a complex medium that occupies so much of audiences’ time and substantial amounts of advertising money.

There is no strictly uniform method of buying TV time across countries. Television networks mainly function as suppliers of programmes to local stations. They sell commercial time to offset their costs of buying shows and pay a fee to stations to carry their programming.… Read the rest

Advertising Response Models

Advertising, being a form of mass communication, reaches numerous people simultaneously. Because it is highly visible and touches our lives, almost everyone has some pet views about it. Advertising produces both intended and unintended results. The intended results serve the objectives of the advertiser such as increasing brand awareness or producing profitable sales. Roland Berman has made the following observations

“Advertisements do more than inform or persuade. They eloquently translate feelings and opinions. Through advertising and the media we receive an enormous amount of silent information: how to act in relation to people, property and ourselves. And that information is a barometer, attuned to social change.”

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Benefits of Advertising

Basically advertising is an economic institution. Advertising performs important economic function for the advertiser, affects economic decisions of audience and is an integral part of the entire national and international economic system.

  • Information. One cannot debate the importance of information for consumers about various products, services and organizations to make advantageous economic decisions. The decisions made in the absence or with insufficient information may produce negative and undesirable consequences. Because of ignorance the consumer may purchase inferior product or pay higher prices and may not even know that the product exists. Through ads the information reaches a large number of audience in the shortest possible time.
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