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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 March 2019 and 8 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): ML6126.
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This article contains a number of types of promotion, which it incorrectly terms advertising, but which are more properly terms promotion. Marketers make an important distinction between promotion and advertising. Promotion is a general category which includes advertising, but all forms of promotion cannot be termed advertising.
By definition, advertising is a "paid form of communication, in a non-personal media, designed to persuade." Some definitions of advertising also specify that the communication be in a mass media. See Advertising management for a detailed discussion of advertising, how it is defined, and the central characteristics of advertising.
The important issue is that the advertiser must pay a third party media outlet to carry the advertising message. Because the advertiser pays for the space or time, the advertiser has control over the timing of the message, the content of the message and also has control over the intended audience. In effect when an advertiser buys a spot on TV or radio, they are buying access to a defined audience. Similarly, when an advertiser buys space in a newspaper or magazine, they are buying access to that media's readership.
By this definition, the following forms of promotion CANNOT be classified as advertising
Sponsorship (which the article incorrectly calls sponsorship advertising but should be called simply sponsorship. In more than 40 years as a marketer, I have never seen the term sponsorship advertising in any text-book or article. Sponsorship is defined as "the act of providing money for a television or radio program, website, sports event, or other activity usually in exchange for advertising or other form of promotion." When companies engage in sponsorship, such as a logo on an athlete's uniform, they do not have total control over the way that the message is disseminated. This drawback was most clearly apparent at the recent Olympics where the Olympic Committee banned all athletes from displaying any logo or in any way promoting brands that were not official Olympic sponsors. This ban extended to the sponsored athlete's Facebook pages, Twitter feeds etc. Due to this lack of control, sponsorship is not in the same category as paid advertising.
Product Placement refers to the "practice of supplying a product or service for display in feature films or television programs". As with sponsorship, the marketer lacks complete control over the amount of air-time given to the product. Many products are supplied to film sets - some will be featured in the final product, some will be ignored and even those that are featured may only be given a fleeting moment of air-time. In contrast, when an advertiser buys a 30 second spot on TV, the advertiser has total control over how to display the brand within that 30 secs.
Direct mail (which the article incorrectly calls direct mail advertising). By definition, direct mail refers to the practice of contacting and influencing carefully chosen prospects with direct mail - which may be in the form of addressed mail or letter box drops with catalogues or flyers. This type of promotion does not meet the definition of advertising in a number of respects. First, advertising refers to messages distributed by a non-personalormass media. Direct mail, especially addressed mail is a personal media. Secondly, advertising messages are mediated by the third party media outlet. Direct mail is NOT mediated - it is a direct communication between a marketer and a prospect. Therefore, direct mail CANNOT be regarded as advertising. Instead it is a different type of promotion.
Please define your terms!
When editors start new pages in the marketing area, it would be very helpful, and very wise to advance an accepted definition of the article's main topic in the opening paragraphs. All too often, I have seen marketing articles that either fail to advance a realistic definition, or that advance a poor quality definition (possibly unsourced and occasionally fabricated) which then sets the tone for the rest of the article. If the core topic is not properly conceptualised, the article's contents will eventually stray further and further away from the main theme. If the definition is too broad, the article tends to become a dumping ground for all manner of content that is only vaguely related to the central theme. There are already too many articles in the marketing area that lack focus, often due to definitional/ conceptual problems that become embedded for want of better definitions which set boundaries for what is to be discussed and what is not to be discussed.
When editors add to existing pages, please take note of any definitions - and ensure that content which is to be added fits with the existing definition. If your new content is not a good 'fit' and you believe that the existing definition is incorrect, then you should revise it with reference to reliable sources, before adding new content. When your content is not a good fit, it may well be that it is off-topic and actually belongs on a different page. Have a look around and see if you can find a better place for your content. Start by looking at the 'See Also' links at the bottom of the article - these usually provide links to closely related topics - which might provide a few clues as to where your content might belong.
It's not good enough to simply add ill-fitting content and hope that no-one will notice or that some-one else will fix it up on your behalf.
BronHiggs (talk) 20:59, 18 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@BronHiggs: Unfortunately IP editors are unlikely to read talk page comments, or in many cases to perform good large edits. Sponsorship, direct mail and promotion wasn't in the page from its original version in 2006 onward. An anonymous IP added the three in March 2015, and made the page worse. Here is the page before with multiple inline refs, and here is the page after their edits. The page was then vandalised in vandalised in March but the removed material wasn't restored when the vandalised additions were subsequently removed due to manual deletion rather than reversion. If you reckon it would be best, a restoration of the page content to the version at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Advertising_media_selection&oldid=638349678 and then a review and folding in of any relevant intermediate edits might be the way to go. Most of the changes since that version have been minor. ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~02:27, 19 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Hydronium Hydroxide: Thanks for your input. You are only the second person who has responded to anything I have ever posted on a talk page. It's so exciting! I have been on Wikpedia for less than 2 months, but came with the mission to improve/ clean-up some of the marketing/advertising pages - many of which are seriously sub-standard and conceptually flawed. It has not been an easy journey. Some pages are heavily patrolled by editors who automatically reject all new content. Other editors have attached themselves to me seemingly wanting to serve as my personal mentor and have given me some really, really bad advice - along the lines that all articles should be copied into the Sandbox where I am supposed to work on them and only replace the original when my revised version is perfect (which of course, no article can ever be perfect, so that seems to be a dead end). However, one bit of advice was that I should place notices of my intentions on the discussion page. So, that is what I have been doing. So far, have added extensive notes with suggestions for improvement on a dozen or more articles. In addition, I have totally revised about 6 articles, and am nearing completion on the 7th Advertising management. The page on advertising media selection is by no means the worst that I have seen to date. It lacks reliable sources and as mentioned has some conceptual/ definitional problems. But these should be relatively easy to fix. The problem is that I cannot do everything. I have decided not to touch pages that are heavily patrolled or where I have had very reasonable edits challenged. Instead I am focussing on putting up suggested topics and sub-topics for on the discussion pages of selected articles e.g. Integrated marketing communications; Marketing research; Positioning (marketing); Marketing - this is to get around having material constantly challenged and wasting time responding to challenges only to find that the challenger's concerns morph into new and different challenges. Now I am trying to find that are not heavily patrolled and devoting my energies to fixing them. I may get back to this current page when I have finished work on my current challenge, namely the article on Advertising management. BronHiggs (talk) 04:22, 19 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The section on media scheduling does not provide much detail on the advantages/ disadvantages of each option, nor does it suggest when each approach is indicated. The sub-section on Blitzing does not even mention advs or indications.
Statements such as "covers different market situations" (in Pulsing section) are too vague to be helpful. Which situations? Provide specific examples or guidelines.
Expand section : Types of advertising
As this article is about advertising media rather than advertising, I would recommend that the heading read Types of advertising media. This section should advance a definition or explanation of what exactly is meant by the concept of advertising media. This would set the scene for what follows (as well as avoid an empty heading).
Product Placement: Definitional problems and conceptual problems
This section is calling for a robust definition of product placement. Product placement is broader than just placing products in TV and film sets. Product placement is increasingly being used in books and articles. One of the first to use this type of promotion in a book was Fay Weldon's, The Bulgari Connection for which the author received an undisclosed sum to feature Bulgari jewellery as a plot device. Since then the possibilites of using e-books for product placement has become increasingly popular. If a robust definition was supplied, it would soon become clear that product placement is a form of promotion, but it is not a form of advertising.
Sponsorship : Definitional problems and conceptual problems
The article makes the claim that "Sponsorships are intended not to be viewed a blatant advertisement." This is most likely because sponsorship is not a form of advertising. It is a type of promotion, but not all types of promotion can be classified as advertising. The terms, 'subtle' and 'blatant' carry certain connotations and cannot be considered neutral.
Citations Needed: Too many statements are unsourced. If more of an effort to consult reliable sources was undertaken when contributing sections, many of the glaring errors and omissions in this article could be avoided.
I've clipped the non things per your suggestions earlier (as well as advertising-free media).
Perhaps the "Types of advertising" section title should be "Types of scheduled advertising"?
At some point this article should be listed in the sidebar and navbox templates.
The broadcast audience data table should go in the main article rather than here. External links explicitly in the table should be avoided (WP:ELLIST). Where the organisation already has an article, the external link (to its official site) should be at that article. I'll edit a bit.
I've updated the table (which probably doesn't belong in this article). Re Statista, they appear to be an aggregator rather than the official/primary source for Canadian radio or US TV. If use of such aggregated stats is common in determining advertising media selection, then this could be mentioned in the body (but unless there's a good reference for the use of Statista, perhaps either leave generic or use the top 2-3 as examples - perhaps differentiated by market?) ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~02:35, 11 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Hydronium Hydroxide: Thanks for all your efforts. Something needed to be done to this article to make it more useful and to differentiate it from the dozen or so other articles devoted to advertising and media planning. Every little bit is an improvement. My main concern with this article is that it canvasses content that is more than adequately covered in other articles. It doesn't add any new value to Wikipedia. My own feeling is that it is a strong candidate for deletion.
Re: Audience research. If the article is to cover 'audience research', then I think that there is a place for the table there. I guess that is the big question - should audience research stay or go? Re: Statista - I must admit that I don't know a lot about North American primary sources for audience research, but I have seen good data in the past. I found the Statista reference on another Wikipedia article and it seemed to be OK. In practice, most advertisers obtain data from the networks or from media buying groups - but this is not available to the general public. Instead, most countries have broadcast authorities or commissions that are required to provide basic audience data to the public. It's got to do with license fees - if governments collect hefty fees for selling bandwidth, then there is a public right to know who is listening or viewing i.e., how that bandwidth is being used. The data provided on these sites will never be as detailed as what is available directly from the Networks. When I studied advertising some years ago, we had access to the official databases which allowed us to see a minute by minute breakdown of audiences for any TV program (or radio program) - and we could search for the smallest demographic or psychographic segments. It was most interesting because you could see how audiences dropped away just as soon as the commercial break commenced, and continued falling with each successive ad. We could also see how viewers become bored with longer programs as audience falls away in the last 20 mins or so. That's the type of data that most big advertisers and media planners are using. The info that is in the public domain, is not bad for a beginner level and certainly helps Wikipedia users get an idea of how audience data informs media planning.
If you think that it is worthwhile deleting the audience research section, I wouldn't object. The subject is more than adequately covered in Advertising management and to a lesser extent in Media planning and Audience research. If not, I will have a bit of a think about it and see if I can come up with some ideas for content that clearly differentiates this article from other similar articles so that it remains a worthy inclusion in the encyclopedia. BronHiggs (talk) 08:53, 11 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect that the article's name is a significant part of why this page has ended up coatracked with two or three mismatched topics that it's trying to cover.
There's probably a lot of secondary culprits, including Advertising where there's not really any coverage of the technical aspects of advertising (and there should be, as a head article). In theory that might be expected to be Advertising#Media and advertising approaches (which again is possibly not a great name), but that's duplicative with a fair bit of waffle. Advertising management is listed under Theory...! The marketing templates not being commonly used probably doesn't help either.
Re research, while it's important that the use of audience data be covered regarding media planning, unless there's any differences between particular countries or (more likely) by particular schools of thought in relation to this topic, then the sources and techniques of research should be treated generically in respect to media planning. The detail on who conducted it and how belongs in Audience measurement.
The sources of broadcast audience data table doesn't belong at Advertising management (at most, it could be WP:Transcluded from its home in Audience measurement, but I doubt that's necessary). The table here should be merged with the table there. Again, the use of inline external links should be avoided.
I was under the impression that the official/standard ratings bodies were collecting the granular data (??), just that they were only releasing headline data to the public, with the detail available for a fee (??) although there are third-party companies who also slice and dice the raw data (??).
No problem with elimination of the page given the overlap, however the scheduling section looks useful. If folded into Media planning (for instance), then the page mustn't be deleted (*well technically the page history can be merged, but...). Instead it must be either renamed or redirected. Additionally, any merge of content from here must credit this page in the edit comment. Pages which link to here would need to be examined in case they need to be retargetted. (see WP:MERGE)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 March 2019 and 8 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): ML6126.
