The Role Of Mass Media Advertising And The Audience

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Mass media are central to such industrial, mass, affluent societies. We depend on them to know what jobs are available, what goods we can buy, where, and for how much. The essential role of mass media advertising under such conditions is described by David Potter:

It is when potential supply outstrips demand—that is, when abundance prevails— that advertising begins to fulfill a really essential economic function. In this situation the producer knows that the limitation upon his growth no longer lies, as it lay historically, in his productive capacity, for he can always produce as much as the market will absorb; the limitation has shifted to the market, and its selling capacity which controls his growth.

The advertising that Potter describes is done through the mass media, whose primary function is to attract and hold large Links Of London Bracelets audiences for advertisers. Mass media in the United States are commercial media; their job is to gather audiences for persuaders. They also inform and entertain, of course, but informing and ...
... entertaining are only means to the end of delivering mass audiences to advertisers.

As central elements in mass media systems and the mass society, advertisers have two related purposes: to reach the largest possible audience and to reach the ideal (target) audience for their products. An "efficient advertising buy" (reaching the largest number of the ideal or target audience at the lowest price) is measured in cost per thousand (CPT) persons reached and in audience desirability—the age, sex, income, education, occupation, region, location (urban, suburban, rural), and ethnic background of audience members reached.

In 1990, for example, CBS Evening News had two financial problems. First, it had been displaced by ABC's World News Tonight as the most-watched evening news show. This meant that whereas ABC could command up to $85,000 for thirty seconds of ad time in the second quarter of 1990, CBS could sell that amount of time for only about $45,000. The drop in audience also meant that CBS had to offer more "make-goods"(additional ad slots at no extra charge) to compensate for not delivering the promised audience.

The second problem for CBS was that its audience had been and continued to be older overall than the audiences of its two prime competitors, and as Electronic Media commented, "Older viewer demographics... are less marketable."3 By 1995, Variety was noting that "even CBS has backed off trying to convince Madison Avenue that mature Americans do spend money and is now programming young. A shift in programming was under way, designed to attract the younger viewers that advertisers preferred.

There is some evidence that the bulk of those viewers who abandoned CBS after its shift in programming did not go to other networks but instead found their way to cable television channels such as Discovery, Lifetime, American Movie Classics, and Arts and Entertainment, which provide programming more attractive to Americans in the over-50 age group. In 1995, cable subscriptions were up 3 percent, and differences in programming may be one explanation. Moreover, the one cable channel that lost more than 15 percent of its audience during 1994 was MTV.5 by 1999, MTV had re-covered. MTV is now the top cable channel for people aged 12 to 34.

By 1999, CBS had decided to capitalize on the fact that its audience was "skewing older." In the 1998-99 seasons, CBS entertainment attracted the most total viewers but ranked fourth in attracting those key viewers in the age categories 18 to 34 and 18 to 49. The network's new strategy was to "corral higher household ratings by avoiding the overcrowded battle for younger viewers."

In spring 1978, when one of us coordinated hearings on age discrimination and television for the House Committee on Aging, broadcasters testified that as the baby boom generation aged, the size and disposable Links Of London Charms income of that large group would in-crease the desirability of programming for and advertising to the older market. Some signs that this was beginning to happen were evident when the Prime Life Network was launched in 1996. In 1996, there were 63.5 million people over age 50; by 2010, 33 percent of the population will be 50 and over. The mature market is currently worth more than $900 billion.