Towards a Normative Theory of Advertising Media Planning: A Case Study of the Cable Television Industry

294 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988.The absence of a comprehensive theory of media planning remains a distinct problem for those involved in this aspect of advertising, precluding their ability to know what can be done to create media plans that predict precisely advertising's effects on the target audience. To understand fully the media planning process one must consider the marketing situation, advertising situation, and media planning strategy, and tactics, the latter involving advertising and media research, schedule evaluation and optimization, and media appropriations.A framework is proposed that encapsulates a normative theory of media planning, incorporating all of the necessary concepts, resources, methods, and decision areas that planners should utilize for improving their schedules' accuracy. The medium investigated to test this framework is cable television, through a survey of leading advertisers, advertising agencies, and cable operators, three groups heavily involved in the media planning process for cable. Their current media planning practices were assessed in order to compare those with the ideal presented in the framework.The results, analysed with the microcomputer statistical package, SPSS/PC+, revealed that both advertisers and agencies do not yet treat cable as a distinctive medium although they each recognize its unique benefits and plan to use it more for advertising. They also do not fully utilize existing audience, message, or software resources for cable nor employ the more rigorous evaluation or research techniques that could improve the effectiveness of their media plans. Cable operators, meanwhile, offer various services to advertisers and are actively researching their subscribers.While these results might be different for other media categories where more sophisticated procedures are being used, planners using cable should consider more of the concepts, resources, and methods available to them in order to produce accurate estimates of cable television's impact on the target audience. The proposed framework offers a concise yet comprehensive way to consider all of the necessary elements in media planning, providing a valuable foundation for a normative theory of how the media planning process works, while also linking that to current practices. Further research is recommended to validate the framework for other media categories.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD