Why has media planning become important for communication for persuasion?
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Answer:
Advertising is a paid form of persuasive communication that uses mass and interactive media to reach broad audiences in order to connect an identified sponsor with buyers (a target audience), provide information about products (goods, services, and ideas), and interpret the product features in terms of the customer’s needs and wants.
Advertising is usually paid for by the advertiser (e.g., P&G) who has a product to sell (Old Spice), although some forms of advertising, such as public service announcements, use donate and time. Not only is the message paid for, but the sponsor is identified. Advertising began as one-way communication—from an advertiser to a targeted audience. Digital, interactive media, however, have opened the door to interesting new forms of two-way and multiple-way brand-related communication, such as word-of-mouth conversations among friends or consumer-generated messages sent to a company.
Advertising generally reaches a broad audience of potential customers, either as a mass audience or in smaller targeted groups. However, direct-response advertising, particularly those practices that involve digital communication, has the ability to address individual members of the audience. So some advertising can deliver one-to-one communication but with a large group of people.
In traditional advertising, the message is conveyed through different kinds of mass media, which are largely non-personal messages. This non-personal characteristic, however, is changing with the introduction of more interactive types of media, as the Old Spice case demonstrates with its social media that created a great deal of buzz. Richard Edelman, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Edelman agency, emphasizes the emerging importance of word of mouth, which is personal communication through new media forms rather than what he describes as “scripted messages in a paid format.”1 In other words, the communication pattern is not just from a business to a consumer, which we sometimes describe in marketing shorthand as “B to C,” but it can also be business to consumer to consumer, or “B to C to C,” which recognizes the important role of personal communication—word of mouth—about a product or even an advertisement.
Most advertising has a defined strategy and seeks to inform consumers and/or make them aware of a brand, company, or organization. In many cases, it also tries to persuade or influence consumers to do something, such as buy a product or check out a brand’s website. Persuasion may involve emotional messages as well as information. The Old Spice strategy was designed to recognize the negative messages associated with the brand’s old image in order to turn the image around and make it cool for today’s audience.
Keep in mind that, as we have said, a product can be a good, a service, or an idea. Some nonprofits, for example, use ads to “sell” memberships, inform about a cause and its need for donations and volunteers, or advocate on behalf of a position or point of view.