Marketing
Issue No. 26 - December/January 2005/06
Avoid Advertising Clutter
by Dr David Corkindale
Newspaper circulations and broadcast TV audiences have been declining for many years now, meaning that advertisers in these media are potentially reaching smaller numbers of people.
The reasons for the declines are varied, but major media owners Murdoch and Packer have reacted recently by buying up the emerging new advertising media, like the online car, job and house sites, and Google has become worth far more than a major TV network.
Given that the traditional media are delivering less to advertisers in terms of audiences we might expect that their income would have declined. However, even though prime time rating on US network TV, for instance, has fallen by 40% in six years their advertising revenue has grown nearly five times. What is going on?
Well, those that run the main media, like the TV networks, have worked a bit of a miracle.
An advertisement now reaches fewer people than it used to so in order to try to reach a large audience the poor advertisers are requiring more of their adverts to appear.
So the TV and press organisations, in spite of having smaller audiences, have increased their income by increasing the number of advertisements that are placed.
They have also increased the amount of material that promotes their own programs.
The problem of clutter
The downside of all this is that the main media now have much more clutter and this is not good for advertisers.
The amount of non-program material on TV is said to have increased by 20% in the past decade. This has a double whammy effect: it appears to reduce advertising effectiveness and it drives away audiences.
Clutter is the extent and form of all the non-program or editorial material appearing in a medium and its effect may be influenced by several factors: the quantity that appears, the proportion of a medium that it occupies, where it appears and the degree to which adverts for competing products appear close to each ot...
