The growth of digital and interactive television is unlikely to change this picture substantially. The shape of the future can be seen today. If the average viewer can choose among 75 channels, the addition of 10 to 20 more channels is unlikely to change behavior. Digital television brings a clearer picture and the opportunity to buy pay-per-view movies, pay channels, and special events, but since these media do not accept advertising, there are no implications for consumer product marketers. Although the internet has brought interactive salesmanship to more than half of the nation's homes, adding this capability to television is also unlikely to change behavior.
However, one technological development on the horizon has the potential to dramatically alter the media landscape. Personal video recorders (PVRs) allow viewers to create their own virtual television network by recording only the programs that interest them, regardless of the channel on which they appear. The further ability to skip through commercials threatens to undermine the economic base of the medium or, alternatively, to drive the best talent to pay services. In late-2001, penetration of PVRs, was an insignificant 0.5 percent 'U.S.' households, and it remains to be seen whether this technology will grow to the point of affecting television advertising.
Changing Role of Media Planners
As a result of technological advances and audience fragmentation, the role of media planners has changed in advertising agencies. Today, media planning ranks in importance with marketing and creative planning, but in the early days of advertising agencies operations, media planning consisted of simple, clerical tasks. Fewer media were available in those days, and little research on media audiences had been done to guide planners in decision making.
Planning today is executive function because it has become so much more complex and important than it was years ago. Today's planners must have a greater knowledge base from which to formulate media plans. The planners not only must know more about marketing, research, and advertising than did their predecessors. Most important, planners are called upon not only to make decisions, but also to defend those decisions as the best that could be made after considering many alternatives.
What brought about this change? Foremost was the rise of the marketing concept, which changed media planning from an isolated activity to one closely related to marketing planning. In fact, one way to evaluate a media plan is to measure how effectively it helps to attain marketing objectives. Another cause of the change was the development of new and more research data available to help planners choose from among myriad alternatives.
The change is also due to the universal availability of the Internet and low-cost, high-speed computers that make routine the physical acquisition and manipulation of vast amounts of data. The computer is the workbench of planners use to compare and cost out media alternatives. And finally it is used to develop the presentation that will ultimately sell the plan to the client.
Media planning, then, is not so much a matter of being able to answer such relatively simple questions as where to place advertisements or how many advertisements to run each week. It is a matter of proving that optimal decisions were made under a given set of marketing circumstances. Advertisers demand such explanations, and media planners must be able to provide them. Today's media planners have changed as requirements for planning have changed. The new planner must have breadth of knowledge, marketing understanding, research familiarity, computer literacy, creative planning awareness, and media acumen to do the job competently. It is within the framework that media planning now takes place.
Classes of Media
Media are often separated into different classes and categories. Some important classifications include traditional mass media, nontraditional media, and specialized media. This section distinguishes these classifications and describes types of each.
Traditional Mass media
