Page 178 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

MULTIMEDIA ADVERTISING

For advertisers, cable offered the opportunity to target specific view-
ers that broadcast TV couldn’t. Sports, movies, news, and other niche
channels drew audiences because of the type of programming they pro-
vided. By 1990, 63 percent of American homes were wired for cable
and broadcast TV had lost 15 million prime-time households to cable.

Media Advertising: A Game of Eyeballs

As new forms of mass media evolved, so did the need to be able to price
and sell ad space to advertisers. The cost of mass media advertising
is based on how many people are exposed to an ad. It’s called the
“opportunity to see.” Media providers don’t guarantee that people will
see an ad when it’s run. The providers only guarantee advertisers that
the ad will run when and where the advertisers want it to run. It’s a
game of selling space that has the chance to find the most consumer
eyeballs. For newspapers and magazines, ad prices are based on the
number of copies produced and distributed. For radio, it’s the number
of listeners a station draws. The costs of broadcast and cable TV ads are
168 based on the number of households or viewers that watch a program.
Outdoor advertising, which includes billboards, street posters, transit
bus signs, and wallscapes (huge photos on the side of buildings), is
priced by how many vehicles or people pass by a location daily.
The main difference in pricing among media types is the size of the
audience, or how many people can be reached by a specific advertis-
ing medium. The bigger the audience, the higher the cost. A medium
that has a large reach, like TV, is the most cost efficient because it can
deliver an ad message to more eyeballs at the lowest cost. For exam-
ple, one prime-time 30-second commercial on ABC would cost about
$150,000 and reach more than 20 million people. A full-page color ad
in Rolling Stone magazine would set you back about $125,000 and be
seen by one million readers. The cost difference is in targeting. Maga-
zines target a smaller number of readers based on their lifestyles. TV
uses a shotgun approach to reach as many eyeballs as possible. That’s
why TV is considered a cost-efficient way to reach a mass audience.
As the number of readers, listeners, or viewers increases, ad prices
increase. It’s basic supply-and-demand pricing that has worked for
nearly a century. Then came cable. As cable TV audiences grew, broad-
cast TV audiences shrank, but the cost for broadcast TV ad space did
not shrink with the audience.
From 1980 through 2003, the percent of households watching
prime-time TV on the broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox,