Newspaper

Advantages

Mass Audience: Newspapers reach a relatively large mass audience throughout the market with a single exposure. A single ad in the newspaper typically can create more impressions than a single commercial on television, a single Radio commercial, a single outdoor billboard, or single insertion in any other medium. 

Visuals: The newspaper's combination of text and graphics, when used effectively, can create visual appeal that reinforces the messages of its advertising. 

In-Depth: Newspaper ads have the ability to communicate lengthy, complex or detailed information and descriptions. 

Comparison Shopping: Newspaper is an effective vehicle for price shopping, and serves as the prime source for coupons. 

Ad Variety: The medium offers a variety of ad sizes that allow advertisers to meet their budgetary constraints, from a one-column-inch ad to two full-page ads side by side called a double-truck. 

Ease of Tracking: It's relatively easy to track response, primarily through couponing. 

Lead Time: Advertisers can place orders and copy with a relatively short lead time. 

Exposure: The reader controls the amount of exposure to a given ad. They can spend as much or as little time with an ad as they like. 

Geographic Targeting: Zoned editions of newspapers in large metro areas allow for less than full-run advertising. 

• Exposure: The reader controls the amount of exposure to a given ad. They can spend as much or as little time with an ad as they like. 
  
  Geographic Targeting: Zoned editions of newspapers in large metro areas allow for less than full-run advertising. 

Disadvantages

Decreasing Penetration: Gone are the days when almost every American household subscribed to at least one newspaper. Just after WWII, there were more than 1.2 newspapers in the U.S. for every household. Today, it's 0.4, meaning that on average, a household subscribes to less than half a paper. (RAB Newspaper Performance Reports, based on ABC data, are available for most U.S. markets.) (Knight Foundation, 2011) 

Ad Clutter, No Separation: Your ad placed next to your competitors’ can only be an advantage if your price is absolutely the lowest. 

Passive: The paper provides information once consumers decide to buy, but it does not build brand awareness or create product demand. Newspaper advertising thus works mainly for comparing prices. 

Browsers, Not Readers: Most people don’t read all sections of the paper every day. Ads in a given section reach only those who read that section. 

Can’t Target: It's difficult to accommodate selective approaches that improve your cost efficiency and enhance frequency against clearly defined, high-potential customer segments. 

Declining Ad Revenue: All three major newspaper print ad revenue categories have declined sharply in recent years. When compared to 2010, Retail is down 42% since 2005; National is down 45% since 2003; and Classified is down 67% since 2005. (State of the News Media, 2011) 

New Competition from Outside: One of newspaper's ad categories (classifieds) is under attack both from Internet sites and savvy Radio stations. 

Aging Audience: Newspaper readership skews older (50+).

Newspaper Plus Radio

Radio Excels: Where newspaper is deficient, Radio excels. Combining the two in a media mix capitalizes on the advantages of both media. 

Excellent Reach: Radio reaches 72% of every American adults every day, and 93% every week. Using Radio together with newspaper increases the reach of your advertisement among light readers and younger consumers. 

Time: Sixty-two percent of shoppers listened to Radio 13 minutes prior to making a purchase -– providing the greatest "purchase proximity" of all major media. Combining Radio with newspaper allows you to influence more customers and closer to the point of purchase when they are most receptive to critical marketing information.(Radio Marketing Guide, 2011) 

Linear Medium: Radio is a linear medium, unlike newspaper where the reader can skip past ads. 

Intrusive: The success of your marketing strategy depends greatly on how you reach and motivate your customers before their decision to purchase has been made. The intimate power of Radio can stimulate new demand by creating emotional reasons to buy your product and then directing customers to the newspaper for detailed information. It can help maintain loyal customers by keeping your name or brand image top-of-mind. 

Listeners hear commercials: Newspapers like to be judged on how many subscribers or readers they have, not on how many people read an ad. Radio judges itself on how many people are available hear a commercial (Average Quarter Hour). Newspaper readership is more comparable to Radio’s cume audience. 

Targetable: Radio programs many different formats, each attracting a particular demographic or lifestyle listener. Advertisers targeting a specific audience often find Radio more efficient than newspaper. 

Message Frequency: Radio adds impact through message frequency. That means bigger and faster results because repetition sells. 

Yellow Pages

Advantages

Widespread: Ninety-nine percent of U.S. adults are familiar with the Yellow Pages. (Local Search Association, 2011)

Emergency Reference: Consumers often rely on the Yellow Pages during emergency situations. 

Targets Consumers: Ads primarily target consumers already interested in purchasing a product or service. 

Traditional Acceptance: Having a listing in the Yellow Pages has historically been a "must" for retailers. 

Disadvantages

Encroaching Competition from the Internet: Yellow Pages-like services on the Web are replacing printed books. These directories offer ease of use, mobile accessibility, more logical organization of data, and the capability to update information more often. 

Limited Exposure: Less than half of U.S. adults (46%) refer to the printed Yellow Pages directory during an average week. The other 54% will not see your ad. (Local Search Association, 2011) 

Ad Clutter: Your ad is lumped in with all the others for the same product, where shoppers can compare. 

Inconvenient: Phone books tend to be bulky, hard to store, and not readily available to consumers outside of the home or office. Their availability is limited to the locations where most purchases are made. How many pay phones have you seen that have a complete book? (Indeed, with the ever-increasing use of mobile phones, how many pay phones have you seen?) 

Inflexible: Most directories are published once a year, and advertising must be purchased well in advance of the publication date. You can’t make corrections or changes resulting from dynamic business conditions or opportunities. 

Too Many Books: In many communities, there are several different directories all competing for listings. Who reads them all? 

Minimal Consumer Awareness: Since the Yellow Pages typically are consulted after the decision to buy has been made, top-of-mind awareness must be built in other ways. As products continue to proliferate and the retail business becomes saturated, you must create demand for your products before the buying decision has been made. 

Yellow Pages Plus Radio

Limited Exposure: The combination of Radio and Yellow Pages (hard copy or online) can work more effectively to reach, motivate and inform your customers. Radio can create demand and influence shoppers before they decide to buy, and the Yellow Pages can reinforce where they should buy once they have made the decision. 

Top-of-Mind Awareness: While your competition is content with advertising only in the Yellow Pages, you can increase your top-of-mind awareness through Radio – and greatly increase your market share. Radio can help you communicate the unique selling proposition of your business and help draw attention to your Yellow Pages ad instead of those of your competitors. 

Flexible: Radio’s great flexibility lets you make copy revisions at your discretion to accommodate changes in your business. You’re not stuck with the same ad for more than a year, you increase your creative options, and you can generate maximum impact when you combine Yellow Pages with Radio. 

Direct Mail

Advantages

Targetability: With direct mail, an advertiser can target potential customers by geographical area, product affinity, previous purchases, and potential interest based on accumulated or purchased databases. 

Reach: The medium potentially can reach every household in the market, or at least every consumer the marketer wishes to target, usually through mail-merge options where multiple advertisers are combined in a single envelope or package. 

Maintenance: Direct mail can be helpful in building and reinforcing existing consumer relationships through personalized mailings. 

Tracking: The response rate is easily measured, and can be tracked through coupon redemption and return-card/call-back options. 

Precision: Direct mail allows an advertiser to convey highly detailed information about their product or service, as well as deliver product samples for consumers to try.

Disadvantages

Low Response Rates: With an average response rate of just over 2%, most of the people you market to will reject or ignore your offer. 

Attention: When consumers actually do read their direct mail, they tend to read mailings from advertisers they know and like. 

New Customers: Direct mail is less effective in attracting prospects than in reinforcing existing customers. For any business whose future depends on expanding its consumer base, this is a significant liability. 

Consumer Perception: Most consumers refer to direct mail as "junk mail" – and they have an even lower opinion of the most cost-efficient mail-merge packages that combine pieces from a number of different advertisers in one envelope. 

Outdated Mailing Lists: Even among consumers who are not actively trying to have their names stricken from direct mail's rolls, there are many who move each year, making it difficult for direct-mail companies to identify and maintain accurate databases. 

Declining Couponing: Time-crunched consumers are not clipping and redeeming coupons the way they once did, reducing the impact and trackability of many direct marketing campaigns. 

Growing Expense: Ongoing increases in postal rates, paper costs, production charges, and database fees could turn direct mail into one of the least cost-efficient of all media.

Direct Mail Plus Radio

Intrusive: Radio is linear, where consumers listen through commercials, unlike direct mail that quickly gets discarded after little more than reading a headline – if it is even opened. Only one commercial is heard at a time on Radio, drawing attention to that one advertiser. How do you get people to open the direct mail they usually discard? By augmenting your marketing strategy with Radio to call attention to your mailings, and precondition recipients to the benefits of reading and responding to your direct mail offers. 

Creates Brands: Radio generates new customers by branding an advertiser. Radio, with its reach and frequency, develops an image for the advertiser. 

Personal Connection: The Radio Ad Lab (RAL) in its study called "Personal Connections, Personal Relevance" shows how consumers connect with radio. Consumers listen to a station because they enjoy it, unlike the “junk” perception associated with direct mail. 

Cable TV

Advantages

Reach: Cable TV now reaches more than 90% of U.S. television households. (Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, 2011) 

Targeted: Cable networks are targeted to specific demographics and clusters of people. 

Affluent Audience: Data from a variety of sources indicate that pay cable homes are considerably younger, more affluent and better-educated than non-cable households. (Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, 2011) 

Cost: Low CPMs. 

Programming Diversity: Cable channels are willing to take chances on the types of trendy programs that broadcast networks typically will not consider. 

More Options: Between 2005 and 2010, the number of original programs on ad-supported cable almost doubled. (Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, 2011) 

Disadvantages

Small Audiences: You can’t have large audiences for any given channel or program when there are dozens, even hundreds of channels from which to choose. Individual cable channels rarely pull in the big ratings. 

Production Costs: According to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, production costs for a national :30 commercial averaged over $300,000 in 2009. Producing quality commercials significantly impacts ad budgets. 

Commercial Quality: A certain percentage of cable commercials done on a local scale tend to be poorly produced, creating a poor image for cable TV advertising. 

Ad Clutter: Commercial clutter is very high on some cable channels. 

Income: Consumers with annual household incomes under $30,000 are the most devoted television viewers (including both network and cable channels). (TV Dimensions, 2011) 

Reach: Local commercials appear only on ad supported cable channels distributed through cable systems. Although over 90% of households receive cable channels, only about 60% receive those channels as a subscriber to a cable system. The remainder receive cable channels through Alternative Distribution Systems (ADS), which is predominantly satellite. 

Cable TV Plus Radio

Excellent Reach: Radio reaches 93% of all Americans 12 years and older every week, based on 2011 Arbitron studies. Cable TV reaches 70% of adults ages 18-49 and 73% ages 25-54 on a weekly basis, according to TV Dimensions 2011. And branding requires reach. Can you think of a single advertiser who has used cable to create a brand? 

Larger Audiences: Radio has fewer channels in most markets than the number of Cable TV channels available to subscribers. Fragmentation of audience across dozens, or even hundreds of channels, means an average Radio station can reach more people than an average cable channel. 

Quality Production: Quality Radio production costs a fraction of what quality TV production costs. Advertisers buying inexpensive Cable TV commercials are unlikely to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV commercial production. Inexpensive commercials create a poor image for the advertiser. This is especially true when the spots airs near a quality network commercial. 

Reduced Clutter: Advertisers have expressed concern over the number of commercials per hour on Radio, yet Cable TV airs on average twice as many commercials per hour. Commercials are more powerful when limited as they are on the Radio. 

Power of Persuasion: According to Radio Ad Lab studies, adding Radio to a TV campaign can increase a consumer’s brand preference in relation to purchase intent. 

Communication: Effectively communicates a message that can be received, remembered and played back by consumers.

Out of Home

Advantages

Attention Grabbing: The combination of size, color and illumination attracts attention. 

Strategic Placement: Billboards can be placed in high-traffic areas or other strategic locations, while transit signs can be affixed to the backs and sides of buses, in bus stops, and in rail stations. 

Low Cost: Based on research by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, outdoor’s cost-per-thousand is significantly lower than any other advertising medium. 

Building Word of Mouth: Billboards can generate curiosity in "teaser" campaigns. 

Full-Time Audience: Outdoor's message can appear year-round. For additional fees, outdoor advertisers can purchase evening lighting – or in some cases, even 24-hour illumination. 

Directional: Billboards can be used as directionals, guiding consumers to the location of a given business.

Disadvantages

Brevity: The very nature of outdoor advertising demands that the commercial message be brief and relatively simple. Therefore, it is difficult to communicate product details, competitive advantages, and specific consumer benefits. Billboard companies generally recommend no more than seven words on a billboard, or people speeding by will not have time to read the message. 

Limited Availability: Prime outdoor locations (in high-traffic areas) often are controlled by large, long-term advertisers. Construction of new billboards is restricted by costs, space availability, and sometimes-rigid municipal codes and environmental regulations. 

Lack of Effective Measuring Tools: Unlike other advertising media, outdoor advertising has no truly reliable method to measure its effectiveness. A few studies have been done, but they mostly apply to limited geographical areas and employ widely varying methodologies. 

Low Recall: Commuters behind the wheel and other potential customers are exposed very briefly to outdoor messages, minimizing message retention. Such adverse conditions as heavy traffic or bad weather also can limit message impact and recall. 

Ugly Image: Because of growing environmental concerns, many communities have eliminated, reduced, or limited the volume and placement of outdoor advertising. 

Inflexible: Once a message is up, it generally stays up through the duration of the contract, even if the advertiser's needs have changed. In addition, printing a new message is expensive, possibly taking weeks to produce and days or weeks to have it displayed. 

Out of Home Plus Radio

Power of Sound: To be effective, billboard messages must be brief. That’s where Radio can help. Use Radio to enhance and expand on the message displayed in your billboard showing. 

Reach and Recall: Radio blankets the market. Your outdoor message can be seen only where it is displayed, but Radio allows your message to travel with your customers wherever they go – at home or at the office as well as in the car. By combining Radio with outdoor, you can build your message’s range and frequency – and reach more of your customers more often building recall. 

Personal Connection: The Radio Ad Lab (RAL) shows that Radio listeners enjoy listening to their station and believe the advertiser's message is directed toward them. 

Flexible: Radio gives you the option to easily make copy changes. Use Outdoor for image, and Radio for timely information. A billboard can grab your customers' attention; Radio can give them the details. By combining these two complementary marketing forces, Radio can deliver all the information on your products and services your customers need in order to make intelligent purchasing decisions. 

Bad weather and adverse traffic conditions: Both are known to decrease outdoor ad exposure, but Radio listening actually increases under these circumstances. American consumers depend on their car Radios for weather and traffic reports, so billboards and Radio make an effective drive-time combination.

Internet

Advantages

Direct Response: With the Internet, you can reach highly educated and affluent consumers who are able to purchase your products or services with a click of the mouse. 

Interactivity: The Internet allows your customers to communicate directly with you; they can tell you what they do and don't like, what they want, and what they will buy. They spend as much time as they choose with any amount of information you provide. 

Tracking: Internet technology allows you to measure exactly how many people saw your message…and how they responded. 

Immediacy: Thanks to online commerce, your message can reach consumers just before they buy online…and offer detailed information to shape the buying decision. 

Enhanced Capabilities: As more and more households upgrade to faster broadband Internet connections, advertisers will be able to incorporate rich media formats, which include streaming video, into their ads. 

Flexibility: Online retailers offer consumers the opportunity to shop any time, day or night.

Disadvantages

Little Engagement: As of early-2011, the average click-through rate for Internet ads was only .09%. A Nielsen survey asked adult consumers why they don't like to click on ads: Takes them away from their purpose on the website, 61%; don't see the ads as relevant, 58%; fear of spam, 57%; fear of computer viruses, 55%; don't trust the ads, 54%; don't like pop-up screens, 46%; don't see the ads as engaging, 43%. (Online Media Daily, 2011) 

Compared to Radio: According to a 2011 Adweek-Harris Interactive study, 63% of American consumers say they ignore or disregard all Internet ads. In contrast, only 7% made the same claim for Radio ads. (Media Matters, 2011) 

Consumer Concerns: Consumer Concers Legitimate ads are hard to distinguish from those that are malicious. Individuals using the Internet for spreading viruses or electronic fraud have created worries among Internet users. Phishing, where apparent legitimate businesses ask for credit card and security information, gives rise to identity theft. Also, computer hackers have exposed entire databases of retailers' customer files. 

Infrastructure Problems: As an increasing number of consumers access the Internet looking to shop and buy, sites that don’t prepare for the growth in traffic (particularly around the Christmas holidays) will be plagued by painfully slow loading times or outright crashes. Moreover, e-tailers are very dependent on timely shipping, a possible weak link that could break down just when it’s needed most. Loss of online visitors means your advertising will be less effective. 

Rising Costs: Much of the advertising on the Internet is being sold on a bid basis. The higher the advertiser bids, the better placement of the ad. Premium positions are often higher on a Cost-Per-Thousand basis than Radio. 

New Technology: The Internet, with its rapid advancements in hardware and software, creates confusion among consumers who turn away from many of the newest attention-getting forms of advertising. 

Perception: Advertising is becoming more accepted on the Internet. However, the flip side of increased acceptance is decreased awareness. Many Internet users simply tune out ads or even block them with software designed for the purpose. 

Time: Despite the growing broadband penetration rate, there will probably always be a core base of dial-up Web subscribers. Hardware bottlenecks make navigating the Net a slow, tedious process. Many users, turned off by the time it takes to view graphic-heavy pages, move on quickly when they don’t think the site is worth the wait. 

Too Many Options: With the number of websites growing each day, consumers can only access a fraction of those that are available. 

Plus Radio

Brand Recall: Radio added to Internet advertising increases unaided recall of brand names by 4.5 times than Internet ads alone.(Radio Ad Lab, Radio and the Internet) 

Drive Search: 24% of adults have initiated an online search based on something they heard on the radio.(BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Usage Study, 2010) 

Efficient: Cost-Per-Thousand impressions is still a bargain on Radio. 

Easy to Use: Radio is fast and simple. Turn on the receiver and begin enjoying a favorite station immediately. The Internet's complex, confusing, and often slow processes turn the user’s experience into a negative one. Reach consumers within a positive environment. 

Marketing Partners: Radio and the Internet make perfect marketing partners. Radio has proven its ability to drive consumers to advertised Web sites, and many Radio stations have their own Web sites offering advertisers unique multi-media marketing opportunities. 

Target Specific Customers: With Radio, you can target specific customers by demographic group, lifestyle trends, and specific product affinity. And since the average Radio listener spends almost three hours each weekday and five hours per weekend with their favorite stations, it’s easy to generate enough message frequency to get them to check out your online advertisement. As Radio draws consumers to your online message, it can encourage them to print special coupons directly off the Web and redeem them at your place of business. (Radio Marketing Guide, 2011) 

Perception: Radio is reducing clutter at a time when the Internet is becoming more cluttered. Draw attention to the advertising message by supporting Internet with Radio. 

Trusted: From the beginning, consumers have expressed caution in using and believing the Internet. Radio is consumers' local, trusted source for information. Add credibility to your advertising campaign with Radio.