Research in Media Promotion

Susan Tyler Eastman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9781135665364
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Eastman has assembled this exemplary volume to spotlight media promotion and to examine current research on the promotion of television and radio programs. The studies included here explore various types of promotion and use widely differing methods and approaches, providing a comprehensive overview of promotion research activities. Chapters include extensive literature reviews, original research, and discussion of research questions for subsequent study.

Research in Media Promotion serves as a benchmark for the current state of promotion research and theory, and establishes the role of promotion as a primary factor affecting audience size. Appropriate for coursework and study in programming, marketing, research methods, management, and industry processes and practices, this volume offers agenda items for future study and is certain to stimulate new research ideas.

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INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH ABOUT PROMOTION

This half of the book provides a framework for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand research to date about program promotion on television, radio, and online. The first chapter consists of practical background on industry programming and the conventions of promotion, and it introduces the terminology of the field. The second chapter supplies a theoretical background by detailing the passive and active conceptual approaches. The third chapter reviews what has been researched so far about structural aspects of on-air promos, summarizing what has been learned about the variables contributing to the salience model. The fourth chapter turns to the topics of sex and violence in the content of on-air promotion. And the fifth and last chapter examines the topic of media branding. Taken together, these five chapters will help readers new to the field to understand published articles about promotion, as well as the chapters in the second half of the book. In addition, three of the chapters in Part I contain original studies to be added to the literature they review.

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Orientation to Promotion and Research

Susan Tyler Eastman

Indiana University

Fred Silverman, the legendary programmer for CBS, ABC, and NBC in the 1970s, has been quoted as saying, “Fifty percent of success is the program and fifty percent is how the program is promoted” (Bedell, 1981, p. 141). He meant that capturing high ratings is not just a function of program scheduling and appeal, but is also a function of how the audience is told about the programs. On-air promotion has become a big-budget item for the U.S. television industry, occupying airtime that could otherwise be sold for commercials, and print and online promotion incur costs with no direct return. Moreover, the marketing of images has become one of the central concerns of program suppliers. NBC has spent billions of dollars linking itself to the Olympics, for example. Such leading broadcast and cable networks as Disney (owner of ABC and ESPN), Time Warner (owner of CNN), General Electric (owner of NBC), and Westinghouse (owner of CBS), as well as Japan’s AsiaNet and Murdoch’s Star Network, among others, are devoting enormous financial resources to developing the value of their brand names around the world. The industry’s professional association for those in the business of media marketing, Promax, now holds annual conventions in South America, Europe (England), and Asia, as well as in the United States—conventions that swell annually in the number and prominence of their participants. More savage competition, rising program costs, and the rapid growth of the Internet have been spurs to increased concern about media marketing around the world.

Industry analyses show that the proportion of time devoted to promotion has been growing in the last decade. An hour on ABC or NBC carried 5 more minutes of promotion in 1999 than it did in 1989 (Associated Press, 1999). On average for the six broadcast networks, the amount of promotion now exceeds 4½ minutes an hour in prime time and many more minutes in some other dayparts (Fleming, 1997).

CHANGES AND EXPECTATIONS

It is an industry truism that the best program without promotion has no audience. At heart, promotion on-the-air, online, and in print is the way that stations and networks announce the availability of their programs, but promotion does much more. It creates a mood, identifies a provider, and generates attitudes that reach far beyond a single program. Although promotion can be seen as a mere adjunct to television and radio programming, conceptually, it is a subset of the larger arena of marketing of products and images via advertising and is related to, but not identical with, publicity and public relations. But in the media business, promotion refers particularly to the on-air, online, and print activity of media outlets, and it has a particular characteristic not commonly associated with other products: Not only can programs be promoted externally in television and radio guides and on billboards and other signs, programs can be also promoted within and adjacent to other programs on the air.¹ On-air spots (promos) are widely thought to be the most valuable kind of self-advertising possible and are unique to the broadcast and cable industries. It has been estimated that the U.S. broadcast networks were collectively airing more than 30,000 promos a year by the late 1990s (see Eastman & Newton, 1998a). To carry those promos, the Big Four were collectively foregoing as much as $4 billion in annual advertising revenue they might have earned — unequivocal evidence of the importance they assign to on-air promotion.

The study of promotion is not merely about how the industry reaches viewers and listeners, however. Promotional messages are short bursts of communication that can be examined for their implications about basic processes of communication. They can be studied for what they reveal about how human cognition works, how social persuasion works, and how cross-national images are created and embedded in world culture. Nonetheless, a knowledge of contemporary strategy and practice in television, radio, and Internet programming is essential to understanding most of the studies of promotion that have been published so far. Recognizing how the industry works, how it measures its successes, and how it has changed in recent years explains why increasing industry and scholarly attention has been directed toward promotion.

Five Recent Changes

Just as movie producers spend tens of millions of dollars marketing their big-budget films, the broadcast television and cable industries, and to a lesser extent radio, devote a large percentage of their revenues to promoting their images, their programs, and their services. Five key industry changes have contributed to the increasing significance of broadcast and cable promotion:

1. the rising costs of program production and licensing;

2. the expanded number of program channels;

3. the rapid rise of the online media;

4. federal and state deregulation of the media;

5. the impact of adoption of new user technologies.

First, the cost of original production continues to escalate. Rising prices for content mean that attracting the maximum number of viewers becomes more and more crucial in order to charge the highest possible rates for advertising, since it is that advertising that, in the usual way of things, pays the cost of licensing programs.² Although the broadcast networks have begun producing more of their own programs or requiring equity positions in licensed programs in order to improve their control of costs and expand revenues, promotion becomes even more important as a tool for gaining all possible viewers for every program as the cost of those programs rises.

Second, the increase in broadcast networks from four to seven, counting UPN, the WB, and the fledgling Pax, make competitive positioning at the broadcast level essential. At the same time, PBS appears to be maintaining its ability to attract viewers, and the flood of cable networks, with dozens more on the threshold, makes the rivalry for viewers even more dependent on effective program promotion. These changes in the industry have both reduced the dominance of the established services and simultaneously made promotion of programs and images of greater importance.

Third, the rapid expansion of the Internet has introduced a wholly new set of online competitors. Indeed, cable and broadcasters even compete with themselves by having online promotion because the total amount of time television viewers have available for entertainment and information (from whatever source) remains relatively stable. Although the shape of promotional practices within the online industry has yet to be fully realized, if the past is a guide, the online media will borrow promotional tactics heavily from the broadcast media, just as cable has done, and promotion will become only more important as a way of distinguishing one service from another and attracting audiences—whether they are called viewers or online users.

Fourth is the impact of government deregulation of on-air media and ownership limits. Relaxation or removal of impediments to active self-marketing has had the effect of increasing the importance of that self-promotion. Radio stations can now change their call letters relatively easily to meet marketing objectives, and limits on patterns of scheduling of nonprogram material (including promotional spots, jingles, and teasers) have been removed, allowing stations to exercise creative control of their airtime and to utilize it to promote themselves as much as they wish. At the same time, the concentration of station ownership into larger and larger groups places even more focus on marketing. Most managers of electronic media services are well indoctrinated with the importance of effective promotion and marketing, and the fostering of innovative promotional practices as well as increased salaries for top promotion executives and bigger departmental budgets are evidence of their acceptance of promotion as the third leg of the media business, along with programming and advertising sales.

Finally, the fifth big change has been in the audience’s rapid incorporation of the new media into their daily lives. For a decade or more, television viewers have been able to tape programs for later viewing and change channels at whim, disrupting the impact of program lineup strategies and reducing audience manipulability. The widespread use of videotape recorders and remote controls has ratcheted up the importance of promotion as a tool for distinguishing among competing services and for making multiple uses of the media possible. The likelihood of technological media convergence creates still another capacity in which promotion will be important—the educational function of teaching users how the newest electronic world operates.

Promotion Sets Expectations

Promotion is important because it is part of the frame that governs how programs are perceived and understood by any group or individual (see Scheufele, 1999). As extended to promotion, framing refers to the idea that on-air, online, and print communications exist within a large framework of audience and industry expectations about programs, commercials, and other messages, and cannot be fully understood out of context (see Goffman, 1974, 1979). Programs and commercial messages provide a frame for promotional messages. At the same time, aspects of language, visuals, sounds, and narrative structures themselves provide frames that affect the interpretation of the messages conveyed in promotion. These are often called the executional features, or presentational aspects of promotion, and they act on reception of the message. Moreover, a broad conception of framing encompasses the notion that promotion itself may provide a crucial part of the larger frame for programs and advertising messages. How audience members feel about promotional spots can affect how they feel about the promoted program. Cues within all kinds of messages imply levels of power to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Author Biographies
• Part I Introduction to Research About Promotion
• Part II Applications of Research in Promotion
• Author Index
• Subject Index