Marketing Management, Millenium Edition - epiheirimatikotita.gr

Developing and Managing the Advertising Campaign 287Given all of these media choices, the media planner must first decide on how toallocate the budget to the major media types. Then the media planner searches forthe most cost-effective media vehicles within each chosen media type—relying onmedia measurement services for estimates of audience size, composition, and mediacost.Audiences can be measured according to: (1) circulation, the number of physicalunits carrying the advertising; (2) audience, the number of people exposed to the vehicle(with pass-on readership, a print vehicle will have a larger audience than its circulationfigures suggest); (3) effective audience, the number of people with target audiencecharacteristics exposed to the vehicle; and (4) effective ad-exposed audience, thenumber of people with target audience characteristics who actually saw the ad.Knowing the audience size, media planners can calculate the cost-per-thousandpersons reached by a vehicle. If an ad in Newsweek costs $100,000 and Newsweek’s estimatedreadership is 3 million people, the cost of exposing the ad to 1,000 persons isapproximately $33. The same ad in Business Week may cost $30,000 but reach only775,000 persons—at a cost per thousand of nearly $39. The media planner then rankseach magazine by cost per thousand and favors magazines with the lowest cost perthousand for reaching target consumers. The magazines themselves often puttogether a “reader profile” for their advertisers, summarizing the characteristics of themagazine’s readers with respect to age, income, residence, marital status, and leisureactivities, to help media planners better target their audiences.Deciding on Media TimingIn choosing media, the advertiser faces a macroscheduling problem and a microschedulingproblem. The macroscheduling problem involves scheduling the advertising inrelation to seasons and the business cycle. Suppose 70 percent of a product’s salesoccur between June and September. The firm can vary its advertising expenditures tofollow the seasonal pattern, to oppose the seasonal pattern, or to be constant throughoutthe year. Most firms pursue a seasonal policy, although advertising in the off-seasonmay boost sales and consumption without hurting seasonal consumption.The microscheduling problem calls for allocating advertising expenditureswithin a short period to obtain maximum impact. Over a given period, advertisingmessages can be concentrated (“burst” advertising), dispersed continuously, or dispersedintermittently. The advertiser must also decide whether to leave ad messageslevel, increase them, decrease them, or alternate them in the schedule.In launching a new product, the advertiser can choose among ad continuity,concentration, flighting, and pulsing. Continuity is achieved by scheduling exposuresevenly throughout a given period. Generally, advertisers use continuous advertisingin expanding market situations, with frequently purchased items, and in tightlydefined buyer categories. Concentration calls for spending all of the advertising dollarsin a single period. This makes sense for products with one selling season or holiday.Flighting calls for advertising for some period, followed by a hiatus with noadvertising, followed by a second period of advertising activity. It is used when fundingis limited, the purchase cycle is relatively infrequent, and with seasonal items.Pulsing is continuous advertising at low-weight levels reinforced periodically by wavesof heavier activity. 29Those who favor pulsing feel that the audience will learn the message more thoroughly,and money can be saved. This was Anheuser-Busch’s experience. Its researchindicated that Budweiser could substantially reduce advertising in a particular marketand experience no adverse sales effect for at least a year and a half. Then the companycould introduce a 6-month burst of advertising and restore the previous growth rate.This analysis led Budweiser to adopt a pulsing advertising strategy.