Unit 5 Television and Radio Advertising

Ad Buzz - Commercial television stations began broadcasting in the 1940s. - Modern television advertising shows a trend toward shorter advertisements, with lots of hard cuts (rapid shifting from one image to another) and music. - Old television and radio advertisements would sometimes last a minute or more; now, there many advertisements that last only ten seconds.

Ad Buzz - Many advertisements try to appeal to impulsive decisions by people who are on the road – for example, for a fast food restaurant, a coffee place, a convenience store, and so on. - There are over 4,700 commercial radio stations on the AM band and over 6,000 stations on the FM band in the United States. - There are over 1,300 commercial broadcast television stations in the United States.

The Hard Cut - A hard cut occurs when the televised image or scene on the screen abruptly changes to another, possibly very different, image. - A thirty-second television ad twenty years ago may have had only one or two cuts. Today, a thirty second ad may have dozens of hard cuts.

Lights! Cameras! Tunes! - Jingles are short songs written for an ad which usually names the product in the song and contains lyrics about the value on that product. - Advertisers have begun to rely more heavily on popular songs that have previously been preformed by well-known artists. - Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones $12 million to use their songs Start Me Up when the company introduced Windows 95.

Television Commercials and Settings - The location of where the activity occurs in a television commercial is called the setting. - Many advertisers today emphasize experiential marketing. This means that they don’t focus on the product being sold, but on how the product (supposedly) can make the consumer feel.

MTV and You - MTV uses some of its employees to do “cool hunting”. Cool hunters go out into different communities to talk to teenagers about what’s cool right now and what’s not.

Product Placement and Positive Attitudes - Advertisers are putting more attention into product placement. Advertisers pay the producers of television programs to show the characters on those programs using the advertisers’ products. - You will not see a bad guy use the “placed” product.