faxes the information to them within 5 minutes. Customers can access the infor-
mation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The service can be set up for as little as
$1,000, and business marketers feel that the cost savings in postage alone are
worth the investment.Rust and Oliver see proliferation of new media as hastening the death of tradi-
tional mass-media advertising as we know it. They see a greater amount of direct
producer–consumer interaction, with benefits to both parties. Producers gain more in-
formation about their customers and can customize products and messages better;
customers gain greater control because they can choose whether to receive an adver-
tising message or not.^27 See the Marketing for the Millennium “Advertising on the
Web: Companies Grab the Brass Ring.”
Given the abundant media, the media planner must first decide on how to allo-
cate the budget to the major media types. In launching a new biscuit, Pillsbury might
decide to allocate $3 million to daytime network television, $2 million to women’s
magazines, $1 million to daily newspapers in 20 major markets, and $50,000 to main-
taining its home page on the Internet.SELECTING SPECIFIC VEHICLES
The media planner must search for the most cost-effective media vehicles within each
chosen media type. The advertiser who decides to buy 30 seconds of advertising on
network television can pay $154,000 for a popular prime-time show such as Law and
Order, $650,000 for especially popular programs like FrasierandER,or $1.3 million
for an event like the Super Bowl.^28 The planner has to rely on media measurement
services that provide estimates of audience size, composition, and media cost.
Audience size has several possible measures:■ Circulation:The number of physical units carrying the advertising.
■ Audience:The number of people exposed to the vehicle. (If the vehicle has pass-
on readership, then the audience is larger than circulation.)
■ Effective audience:The number of people with target audience characteristics ex-
posed to the vehicle.
■ Effective ad-exposed audience:The number of people with target audience charac-
teristics who actually saw the ad.Media planners calculate the cost per thousand persons reachedby a vehicle. If a full-
page, four-color ad in Newsweekcosts $84,000 and Newsweek’s estimated readership is
3 million people, the cost of exposing the ad to 1,000 persons is approximately $28.
The same ad in Business Weekmay cost $30,000 but reach only 775,000 persons—at
a cost per thousand of $39. The media planner ranks each magazine by cost per thou-
sand and favors magazines with the lowest cost per thousand for reaching target con-
sumers. The magazines themselves often put together a “reader profile” for their
advertisers, summarizing the characteristics of the magazine’s readers with respect to
age, income, residence, marital status, and leisure activities.
Several adjustments have to be applied to the cost-per-thousand measure. First,
the measure should be adjusted for audience quality. For a baby lotion ad, a magazine
read by 1 million young mothers would have an exposure value of 1 million; if read
by 1 million old men, it would have almost a zero exposure value. Second, the ex-
posure value should be adjusted for the audience-attention probability. Readers of Vogue
pay more attention to ads than do readers of Newsweek. Third, the exposure value
should be adjusted for the magazine’s editorial quality(prestige and believability).
Fourth, the exposure value should be adjusted for the magazine’s ad placement poli-
cies and extra services (such as regional or occupational editions and lead-time re-
quirements).
Media planners are increasingly using more sophisticated measures of effective-
ness and employing them in mathematical models to arrive at the best media mix.
Many advertising agencies use a computer program to select the initial media and
then make further improvements based on subjective factors.^29part five
Managing and
Delivering Marketing(^590) Programs