As a usual practice each one of us tends to change the channel as soon as an advertisement flashes in between our favorite program. But have we ever thought about the efforts which go into the making of an advertisement and how data analysis is done about the placement of the advertisement? Recently I met one of my graduation friends who is into a media company that handles advertisement campaigns for major companies. Though our motive for the evening was to have some fun but I really learnt a lot about the exciting media industry.
It was a rusty start to the evening as rain started to pour heavily just when I was about to reaching our meeting point. After 15 minutes of wait under the roof of a coffee shop, a broad smile came on my face upon seeing my friend running in the rain. Followed by discussions on usual happenings in life I got stuck to the fact that my friend was working with a media giant as a media advisor. Being in technical field only for past 4 years, media was a non ventured field for me about which I had very little knowledge. I was digging into details of each and every word coming out of my friend’s mouth. Until now advertisement break for me used to be the 5 minutes of channel changing activity but now I was getting to learn the technical aspects of advertisement breaks.
When a client approaches any media advisor with the view of airing his company’s ad, first task for the advisor is to target a specific media only which includes targeting one out of the television, radio or banners. After this details are collected into the target segment of society based on gender (male or female), income (high, medium or low) and region (urban or rural). Then data is analyzed for different channels to see which one has the maximum percentage of viewership for the targeted audience. Within the channel then specific programs are looked for which show a steep curve in advertisement viewing for the targeted audience. Then there are other factors which are looked into like frequency of the program i.e. whether the program was 1 time or something special happened during that specific week like a celebrity’s visit. This seemed to be a very tough job as the amount of data to analyze is humongous. For my friend the problem was even bigger because being a north Indian he has little knowledge of the regional programs being aired o radio and television. Usual amount of money on stake for a small campaign over a period of 1 week ranges from somewhere around 7 Million to 20 million. Some clients are big enough to neglect the returns of their campaign while some have specific targets in mind to achieve through the campaign. Some campaigns are refresh campaigns which have the motive to just refresh user’s mind of a previous bigger campaign. After knowing about the advertisement industry my interest in the ads also have increased. Now I look at each ad with a different perspective of why it is coming in between that specific program and on that particular channel. This has increased my eagerness to know more about different industries as it broadens one’s horizon of thinking and understanding.
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