National Programme Officer,
The paper explores the economic relationship between the advertising and media industries, using the interlinked theoretical approaches of leading scholars of the political economy of the media – Nicholas Garnham, Vincent Mosco and Phil Graham. It addresses the commercial imperatives that underlie the media– advertising relationship, and characterizes the latter as a symbiotic but unequal power relationship. While it focuses principally on television advertising, each of the major sections concludes by drawing attention to the rather different dynamics of online and digital advertising. Section 2 (‘Production and Exchange’) theorizes advertising information as a commodity inextricably linked to the production process; it reflects on the mediating role played by ad agencies and media buyers between the media and advertisers, and demonstrates that online advertising may however use alternative business models. Section 3 (‘Distribution and Consumption’) investigates contemporary strategies of audience creation, segmentation and targeting. Techniques of monitoring television audience behaviour, producing ratings, and segmenting audiences are compared with online monitoring methods. The paper concludes that the commercialisation of the media and advertisers’ influence on media content will only continue to grow. Advertisers have emerged as ‘normative reference organizations’ whose demands the media must serve, and whose revenue is critical for media firms to survive.
