Media Mix Strategies

Communicators often use formal mass media channels to develop and maintain relationships with key audiences. Primarily the domain of advertisers and media buyers, media mix strategies involve weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each medium against budget considerations. Media mix strategies also play a role in public relations work. Like advertisers, practitioners are challenged to develop unique messages that cut through media clutter.

Although buying media generally is not a public relations practitioner's responsibility, it is important to understand each medium's operations and needs when putting together information for media representatives. Furthermore, practitioners must consider their organization's overall communications objectives and internal resources and the advantages and limitations of each medium—as well as stakeholder media use behaviors, evolving technologies, and implications of media ownership and management change. Specific communication tasks best carried out by using mass media include placing press releases and public service announcements or advocacy advertisements, staging press conferences, offering interviews, coordinating product placements for films and TV, and organizing special events.

Designing messages and developing media mix strategies involve at least five important decisions. First, the practitioner should review the communication objectives established for the organization and for key public relationships in terms of credibility perceptions, timing, information opportunities, reach effectiveness, motivation, and cost per contact. Funding and staffing resources also must be factored in. Second, selecting media that complement a message requires an understanding of the pros and cons of each mass medium.

Among print media, newspapers are the most immediate and credible information source. Newspapers offer sections tailored to readers' demographic and psychographic needs, are geographically flexible, and lend local flavor. Newspapers' limitations are passivity, shrinking circulations, and low interest among young readers. Magazines target highly selective audiences and lend prestige appeal, produce demographic and geographic editions, and have a long shelf life with pass-along value. Disadvantages include lack of immediacy and long lead times. Direct mail is highly selective and relatively easy to personalize and measure, yet can be costly.

Electronic media such as television, radio, and the Internet are immediate and active—and attract both selective and mass audiences. Network television is beneficial for developing product or service image, and cable television has high penetration for higher-income households. Radio offers good demographic and geographic selectivity and is especially beneficial for targeting mobile populations. On the downside, transmission quality wavers, and messages are fleeting and cluttered. The Internet is an important, cost-effective, global communication vehicle among practitioners, yet stakeholders are concerned about privacy issues, content overload, and unwelcome solicitations.

A third consideration involved in developing media mix strategies is learning stakeholders' media use behaviors. For example, “surfing and scanning” interrupts message flow, sheer abundance of media content competes for attention, and traditional demographic and psychographic data often are inadequate in anticipating audiences' media habits. Fourth, new technologies seem to develop overnight, and practitioners quickly must learn how to use them. Finally, media ownership issues such as splintering and mergers affect change in media routines, personnel, and content.

Indeed, a number of variables are involved in practitioners' construction of viable media mix strategies designed to grow and enhance relationships with key publics. Such media mix decisions are a cornerstone of effective communication campaigns.

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