Television Advertising that Works: An Analysis of Commercials fro ...

Makegoods compensate advertisers for spots that miss audience delivery contractual agreements or for missed airings (Arens, 2004). Fragmentation and increasing clutter contribute to the movement away from placing advertising with traditional mass audience broadcast networks.

Fragmentation and Clutter

Technology has created an ever-selective and mobile audience empowering the media consumer with choice. At the same time, this evolving and growing media landscape has given marketers new and exciting opportunities to promote their brand. However, media growth has produced media fragmentation. Because of this technology growth, we have seen the consumer’s average daily exposures to marketing communication balloon from 500 to 2,000 messages in the 1970s upwards to 5,000 messages a day in 2005 (Howard, 2005). In this fragmented landscape we need not wonder why evaluating advertising effectiveness matters to marketers.

Generally, fragmentation is as much a cause as it is an effect. Jupiter Research analyst David Schatsky (2006) considered fragmentation dynamic and occurring simultaneously in three dimensions: audience fragmentation, personal fragmentation, and media fragmentation. Each form of fragmentation feeds off the other, and as technology continues to change traditional advertising models, marketers must remain fluid and adaptive.

The erosion of the traditional mass media audience, or audience fragmentation, occurs because of increasing media and entertainment choices. Personal fragmentation becomes a product of audience fragmentation since consumers spread their time across new media (Schatsky, 2006). Table 1 shows some examples of audience fragmentation from a study conducted by Fielding and Bahary (2005) for Starcom.