Advertising Media and Media Planning
What this domain tests
Matching media to audiences and objectives, knowledge of media-planning terms, and the ability to compute simple media cost figures such as cost per thousand (CPM).
Main media and their character
- Newspaper - wide reach, quick, flexible, local; short life, poor reproduction.
- Magazine - long life, good colour, selective audience; long lead time, high cost.
- Television - sight, sound, movement, mass reach; very costly, fleeting, hard to target.
- Radio - cheap, local, flexible; audio only.
- Outdoor (hoardings, posters, transit) - high repetition, local, cheap per exposure; brief message only.
- Direct mail - selective and personal; high cost per contact, low response.
- Cinema, point-of-purchase, internet/digital - digital offers targeting, interactivity and measurable response.
Media planning terms
Reach = unduplicated number of people exposed to a schedule. Frequency = average number of exposures per person. Media mix = combination of media used. Scheduling: continuity (steady), flighting (bursts with gaps), pulsing (continuous with heavier bursts). TRP measures television audience; circulation is copies distributed; readership is people who read them.
Worked example
A magazine advertisement costs ₹40,000 and the magazine's circulation is 2,00,000. CPM = (40,000 ÷ 2,00,000) × 1,000 = ₹200 per thousand copies. Reasoning: CPM normalises cost across media of unequal size, so it is the only fair basis for comparing two vehicles. A medium with a higher absolute cost may still be cheaper per thousand readers.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating reach and frequency as the same measure.
- Using circulation as a proxy for readership - one copy is read by several people.
- Choosing media on absolute cost alone instead of cost per thousand and fit with the target audience.
- Forgetting that message length, product type, budget and competitor activity all shape the media mix.