Adapting The Message To The Channel And Monitoring Your Success Or Failure

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Each channel imposes constraints on the messages it relays: format (The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, national network news, Face the Nation, or the New York Times); deadlines (morning or evening papers, drive-time radio); content (weeklies or dailies, audio, print, visual, or audiovisual content); and cost (costs in equipment and personnel to carry this message).

These constraints influence message construction. Television news is a visual medium (consider the talking head versus the visual aid; the effects of location), and it is an audiovisual medium (the brilliant statement might be mumbled, stumbled, and fumbled). Television news deals in 1- to 1.5-minute units, so try to write the quotable quote, the single synthetic sentence that digests Tag Heuer Carrera Replica the debate. It is also a medium favoring the dramatic, the confrontational; it often includes upbeat human interest stories at the end of a program. Also, what is not news today may be recast as news tomorrow (news-worthiness is a function of what else is newsworthy that day).

Television ...
... also includes interview shows (Today, Face the Nation, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer) and televised documentaries. Other appropriate media might be radio news spots or all-news radio, newspapers (chains, national, or county), the wire services, and specialized publications.

In reviewing the success or failure of your distribution effort, ask again what was covered and why. Future messages should be adjusted accordingly.

Use InfoTrac College Edition to access information on topics in this chapter from hundreds of periodicals and scholarly journals. Enter keyword and subject searches: National Advertising Division, consumer boycott.

Political advertising is a primary means through which candidates, parties, and issue advocacy groups communicate to the citizenry. In a typical presidential campaign, more than two-thirds of the campaign budget will be spent for the creation, testing, production, and airing of broadcast ads. Advertising is particularly effective when it is unanswered by those of opposing views. For example, when the tobacco companies outspent such opponents as the American Cancer Society and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids by roughly forty to one in opposing the McCain tobacco settlement in spring and summer 1998, a survey conducted by the Annenberg Tag Heuer Replica Watches Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania showed that the likelihood that the claims of their ads would be believed was directly related to the amount of exposure purchased in service of their message. The McCain bill would have imposed substantial penalties on the tobacco industry if the rate of teen smoking did not drop, and it would have added a substantial tax—$1.10 to each pack of cigarettes. One of the reasons that advertising does not appear to move votes dramatically in many election campaigns is that both sides are making cases and, in the process, canceling out each other's effect.