Page 228 - DMGT507_SALES AND PROMOTIONS MANAGEMENT

Sales and Promotions Management

Notes Clutter: A commercial may face trouble being noticed for a number of reasons, such as fleeting
messages, shorter commercials, non-programme material presented during commercial break,
and because the advertiser's message is only one of many other spots. For any TV programme,
the number of viewers decreases during commercial breaks. If the number of commercials
increases, the viewing audience decreases for the duration. Advertisers are more interested in
placing their commercials during popular TV programmes leading to insertion of many short
duration spots and causing more clutter. It is easy to understand why the viewer gets confused
or often annoyed and unable to recall or clearly identify the advertised product or service.
Limited Attention by Viewers: Buying time on television does not guarantee exposure. It only
offers the advertiser an opportunity to communicate the ad message to a large number of
audiences. As already mentioned, the size of the programme viewing audience decreases during
a commercial break. Viewers move away from the TV set for one or the other reason to avoid
seeing commercials.

With the increase in the number of commercials, getting audience to pay attention is becoming
an increasingly powerful challenge. Audience members find themselves comfortably armed
with remote controls that make zapping and zipping convenient.

Notes Zapping refers to changing channels to avoid commercials. John J. Cronin's
observational study found that in the US, as much as a third of programme's audiences
may be lost to zapping when commercials appear. Probably, the incidence of zapping in
India would not really be very different either.
Zipping refers to fast-forwarding through commercials as they appear when viewing a
previously recorded movie or some other programme. Another study by John J. Cronin
found that most viewers watching previously recorded programmes fully or partially
zipped commercials.

13.1.1 Buying TV Time

Television is not a homogenous medium and reaches a variety of audiences. Television is a
constant companion to some users; to others it is a source of news or occasional entertainment.
It is complex medium that occupies so much of audiences' time and substantial amounts of
advertising money.
There is no strictly uniform method of buying TV time across countries. Television networks
mainly function as suppliers of programmes to local stations. They sell commercial time to
offset their costs of buying shows and pay a fee to stations to carry their programming.

Buying Network Time

Network television advertising is concentrated among few large advertising agencies and
advertisers who spend huge sums of money. There are three basic elements to buying TV
network time:
1. Negotiation: There are no rate cards, unlike most other media, for network television
advertising. Buying agencies and networks bargain to reach a cost figure for the upcoming
schedule. Agency comes to the bargaining table with a fair idea of what level of cost per
rating point they can pay, because the difference of just a few rupees per rating point is
significant when the agency is buying hundreds of commercials. Networks too have some
gross monetary figure in mind for their upcoming schedule. Each party knows that there

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