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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
V. Developing the
Integrated Marketing
Communications Program
10. Media Planning and
Strategy
While you are probably already familiar with
terms like PIP (picture in a picture), DVD, and
PDA (personal digital assistant), you may not
know about DSL (digital subscriber lines), VOD
(video on demand), and PVRs (personal video
recorders). You may have heard of these technologies,
but do you really know what they do?
Media and entertainment people think they
know about all of these things, but whether they
do or not is open to debate.
The recent buzz in these industries is about
convergence and how it is going to change the
media landscape. The advent of digital television,
mobile phones, and the Internet has led to
the belief that the traditional means of watching
television will be a thing of the past, with viewers
now “multitasking,” that is, using more than
one medium at once (e.g., surfing on the Internet
while watching television). Such technologies
will empower consumers to control their own
© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003
DSL, VOD, TiVo and PVR:
They All Add Up to Convergence—Or Do They?
streams of information, entertainment, and content,
where and when they want them. Should
this be the case, media planning in the future
will have to change demonstratively to keep
pace. The new technologies may alter the communications
landscape forever.
Consider the changes that may occur as a
result of interactive television. Rather than being
just a box that provides viewing entertainment,
the television is being transformed into an interactive
tool that allows the viewer to play games,
access movies on demand, surf the Web, and
make purchases. Microsoft is betting that in the
future most of us will access the Internet through
our television sets rather than on our PCs.
A recent study conducted by the Nielsen Interactive
Group claimed that 30 percent of Internet
users now have Internet access in the same room
as their TV sets. Further, the study showed that
67 percent of active Internet users are on the Net
at the same time that they are watching television.
What this means—according to Nielsen and
others—is that the likelihood of watching television
commercials will decrease and advertising
revenues to this medium will also go down. What
it also means is that opportunities will exist to
reach consumers through other media like the
Internet and cell phones. To a degree, consumers
will almost never be out of the reach of a commercial
message, and advertisers will have the
opportunity to send their messages through a
variety of platforms.
Take Nissan, for example. The company’s
launch of a new 4 × 4 in Britain employed interactive
TV to provide specifications, additional
information, and requests for brochures and test
drives, all at the click of a button. Virgin Mobile,
another British company, used iTV to ask potential
customers what annoyed them about their