Information About Mediated Advertising

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Before the advent of the mass media, salespersons would often be the bearers of their own advertising, repeating the same message and carrying the same products from door to door. With the rise of mass media, such door-to-door advertising has become prohibitively expensive for most nationally sold products. Even with products like Avon cosmetics that are still sold door to door and person to person, television ads are used to predispose residents to open their doors and purchase the product.

When the door-to-door salesperson was replaced by a mediated one, the ability of the salesperson to tailor the message to each individual receiver or adapt the message in response to audience reaction was reduced. The producer of an ad carried by the mass media, rather than in person, must Cartier Santos Replica create a message that speaks to what a mass audience shares rather than to the individual differences of the millions who will hear or see the message.

A second major shift occurred when television, radio, and print became the conduits ...
... of advertising. None of these media could bring a real product into your home. Instead, each carried a representation of the product. So, although the traveling sales-person could show you that the product worked and could actually sell you the product, the mass-mediated ad was forced to add an additional step in the persuasive process. The ad needed to persuade you to go where the product could be found and to buy the product. First, the ad would often attempt to give you a vicarious experience of using the product satisfactorily, so the next time you had the option to buy the product, it would already seem comfortable and familiar. Thus, the seller who would throw dirt onto a cloth stretched out on your carpet to demonstrate that the vacuum cleaner would efficiently pick it up was replaced with a mediated salesperson in an ad that showed you what the producer hoped would be something comparable. But in your home you could see the dirt, see the vacuum, and testify that there were no tricks. The door-to-door salesperson offered firsthand experience of the performance of the product. In the ad, all sorts of tricks could be employed to make it appear that the vacuum was more effective than it really was. Consequently, a need arose for rules governing what an advertiser could and could not do in ads.

A third shift occurred with the arrival of Internet advertising. The move to interactive Internet advertising is in the process of occurring. Of the $200 billion spent on U.S. advertising in 1998, $2 billion was spent advertising on the Internet. This figure is projected to increase to $8.9 billion by 2002.
The convergence between the television and the personal computer is opening new opportunities for advertisers. WebTV, ACTV, Source Media, and World Gate are inter-active software firms that enable those watching an ad in a television program to click on a link and be sent to the relevant Omega Replica Watches Web site for additional information. A viewer could also link to a chat room to talk about the product. Although the advertiser isn't physically in your living room, you and he or she are now closer to the relationship of salesperson and client that characterized house-to-house selling. Meanwhile, of course, you are not watching the program that has returned to the screen after the ads. And you are paying no attention to any of the ads that followed the one that enticed you into hyperspace.
Studies of the Web suggest that as many as four in ten of U.S. households already have a personal computer and television in the same room. Both are frequently on at the same time. "Programmers see some real problems with the prospect of giving television viewers one more reason to leave the tube and surf the Web," notes an article in Electronic Media.'