Introduction

Mass Media are essential any type of communication campaign. I am using, by the way, the term MEDIA in plural, even though it is a extended linguistic practice to use the word in singular (Mass Media is, Mass Media has, …). The singular form is MEDIUM. I consciously use the term in plural because there is no a single MEDIUM, but a variety of them. It is important in strategic communication to know the nature and characteristics of every single medium to use it effective.

As a communication professional, you will have to create messages that are tailored to the characteristics of a certain public – your target audience. And one of the most important decisions your will have to take is which is the right channel to reach your audience.

The vehicles we use to get our messages to the target audience are the MASS MEDIA. Therefore, communication professionals are – should be – media experts. Not in vain, the first strategic communicators were or had been journalists.

We discussed in the second learning unit the differences between Advertising and the broader field of strategic communication. In Advertising, we said, you pay for time and space and you can have total control over the message.

In strategic communication the relationship to the media is totally different. Here, you have to persuade journalists and editors to publish your press, audio or video releases, and to cover the events you stage. In both cases, you do not have control over what is going to be published. Editors in the media outlets can ignore or alter the contents of your news releases. They can report your events in a way totally opposed to the interests of the organizations you are working for

It is very important then that the communication professional learns and accepts the rules of the Mass Media.

The first step is to study which are the effects of Mass Media on individual and society. We need this knowledge, for instance, to decide which strategies and techniques we are going to use in our campaigns. In this learning module we will, first of all, discuss several theories that try to explain those effects. In the second online lecture, we will talk about the communication conditions created by the media activity in our society.

Mass Media Effects

In this lecture, I will summarize the development of Mass Media effects research and try to explain how those theories affect the professional practice of strategic communication. When I discuss the topic Mass Media effects, I like to recall the origin of the research in this field, how everything started.

And everything started the Halloween evening of 1938, one of the most interesting episodes in the U.S. history of the 20th Century.

That evening, Orson Welles directed a life radio broadcast program with the title: “The Invasion from Mars”. The fictional radio show was based on “The War of Worlds”, a popular science-fiction novel by H.G. Wells.

Welles’s program – and the novel – was about the invasion of the earth by inhabitants of the planet Mars. (You may know the last filmic version of this novel directed by Steven Spielberg starring Tom Cruise).

The amazing event of that Halloween evening of 1938 was that almost 6 million American citizens believed that America was actually being invaded by Martians. Many of them panicked and left their houses trying to escape from the invasion to who knows where. The radio shock made Orson Welles famous overnight. He signed a contract with the film studio RKO and became one of the most relevant American filmmakers (two years after “The Invasion from Mars”, he released “Citizen Kane”, which is regarded by many film critics as the best movie ever).

This episode – that belongs now to American History – opened the eyes of the Communication Researchers. If the people believe that they are being attacked by extraterrestrials, this was the starting thought, they will believe everything we tell them through the Mass-Media.

This is the reason why researchers started to investigate which are the actual effects of Mass-Media on individual and society.

Selective Exposure Theory

Ironically the first outcomes of empirical Mass Media Research during the 1950ies seemed to deny any influence of Mass Media on individuals or society. According to the findings of those pioneers in the field of mass communication, individuals expose themselves only to those messages that are in consonance with their previous opinions, while they tend to ignore every message that is in contradiction with their world of values and beliefs.

They called this phenomenon SELECTIVE EXPOSURE.

The selective exposure theory is based on Leon Festinger’s concept of “cognitive dissonance”. The individual, according to Festinger, needs to avoid ideas that are in dissonance to each other. When the individual becomes aware of this dissonance, one of the ideas needs to be rejected in order to keep the inner balance. For instance, a convinced democrat voter may avoid negative messages about the democrat candidate (or positive ones about the republican one). Accepting those dissonant messages might force him/her to reconsider his/her own political standpoints.

The Selective Exposure theory minimizes the power of Mass Media. The only possible effect would be reinforcing what we previously believed. If we avoid those messages that are in contradiction with our previous beliefs, the media can impossible change our minds.

Gate-Keeping Effect

Although there is something true in the selective exposure approach, it was also obvious that the Mass Media had an influence on our life and on our society.

Very soon, Kurt Lewin established the concept of GATE-KEEPING to describe the flow of information in mass communication.

In this context, a gatekeeper is any individual who has power over that flow of information, who can control what is going to be released to the public. In mass communication we find whole networks of gatekeepers. Let’s say that you are working as a free lance PR writer. You produce a press release and send it to a newspaper. The assistant editor will first read your release. If this gatekeeper accepts it, it will go to the next step: the senior editor of this section of the newspaper. Still, whether the piece will be published or not, will be decided by the editor-in-chief. Whatever reaches the public needs to go through a series of filters. And of course, an important amount of information is filtered out in the process (as a matter of fact, only 20% of the press releases produced by PR departments and firms are finally published).

Which is the influence of the gate-keeping effect on Strategic Communication?

Gatekeepers are the key to reach our target audiences. Therefore, it is priority for PR practitioners and agencies to create a broad and solid network of relationships with people in those key positions. We will need the time and space they have control over.

When we discussed the topic “Ethics and Communication” we saw that this is one of the most delicate issues. Sometimes, companies hire gatekeepers as “consultants”, which may of course influence their decisions about what is going to be published and how it is going to be published. This is considered by the PRSA’s code of ethics a corruption of the flow of information. In other cases, PR companies send expensive gifts to journalists or organize luxurious press tours in order to gain their good will.

Agenda Setting Theory

Closely related to the Gate-Keeping theory – or as a consequence of this theory – the mass communication scholars Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw revealed in the 1970ies the so-called AGENDA-SETTING EFFECT OF MASS MEDIA.

The agenda setting approach is a response to the selective exposure theory.

Even if the media cannot determine what we think because we tend to avoid those messages that are in contradiction with our beliefs, McCombs and Shaw proved that they can surely determine what we think about.

They select from the complex reality a couple of subjects. And with this selection, they can determine what we are going to worry about, what we are going to talk and to discuss about, which topic we are going to have an opinion on. This is what we call news.

Whatever is not in the media will never get into our awareness. It simply does not exist for us. In this way, mass media shape how we perceive the reality.

Relevance of the agenda setting effect for Strategic Communication

Since an essential part of PR practitioners’ job consists in generating media attention, they need to adapt their messages and events to the rules dictated by the media. And these rules can be condensed in the so-called NEWS VALUES. News values are the criteria, the factors that usually determine when a happening will most likely become NEWS.

PR people need to keep constantly in mind the 7 news values because they constitute a kind of “Bible” for journalists, editors, and media professionals.

The 7 news values are:

1. Timeliness: By definition, news must be current. You cannot send a press release saying that last week a new Chief Executive Officer was appointed in your company. It is too late. Even if nothing special happened in your company, you have to create links to the present time. For example: Holydays, when people usually drive, is a good time for Auto-Manufactures to remind the public how important is to drive safely – or not to drink when you drive. You can also create a LINK to current events and Issues that on the Public Mind. For example: In summer, forest fire is always in the public consciousness. Thus, it is the ideal time to stage awareness events.
2. Prominence: Whatever happens to celebrities is news. Companies try to lure celebrities to their events because they are aware that broadly known names will always attract the press. Edward L. Bernays, a name you should at this point of the course be familiar with, was also a pioneer using celebrities to gain media coverage. In 1929, he organized one of his most important events: the Golden Anniversary of the Electric Light. Bernays persuaded Henry Ford to host the celebration and president Hoover to attend it. Many other celebrities of the time were present. The event was supposed to be in honor of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the electric bulb. However, and even if nobody suspected it at that time, Bernays was working on behalf of the General Electric.
3. Proximity: A case of sexual harassment at the CCSU will immediately attract your attention – but a case of sexual harassment at a university in Singapore hardly would interest you. You will have look for a local angle to present your news, so that the possible reader get involved. Editors will also be interested in news that affects their communities.
4. Significance: Significance is related to how many people – and/or how deeply – are affected by the news. The more people, and the deeper these people are affected, the higher will be the news value.
5. Unusualness: Anything that is not ordinary, that does not happen every day can also attract the attention. Companies sometimes create publicity stunts, crazy or weird events, with the only goal of getting media coverage. Environmental activists are excellent creating extravagant actions that will become news.
6. Human Interest: In some cases, individual stories of anonymous people may have a deep human interest that makes them newsworthy. Take as example the case of a grandmother in the 90ies who is graduating at one university where his granddaughter is studying. That would make excellent material to write a feature story that might help you generate attention for the university
7. Negativism: One of the most important axioms in Journalism is: BAD NEWS ARE GOOD NEWS !!! When something goes wrong, media will always show up. An example: After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a Mineral Water Company donated a couple of tons of Mineral water to secure the water supply in the affected areas.

Pseudo-Events

The media can set or build the public agenda not only selecting from the real world topics and issues. A very important part of the PR activity is to stage events that will become news.

The Historian Daniel Boorstin created the term PSEUDO-EVENT in his classic book “The Image” (1961) to refer to those stage events.

Edward L. Bernays’s work is, again, the best reference to understand what a pseudo-event is. The Owner of a hotel asked Bernays how to improve the prestige of his institution. Bernays didn’t advise him to hire a new manager or to improve rooms or services. His idea was to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Hotel. Several important people formed a committee to organize the celebration: a lawyer, a prominent banker, a preacher and other important people of the community. They planed an event, a great banquet, to call attention to the distinguished services the hotel has been rendering the community. Of course, the press was invited to cover the information of the banquet. The sensation of the media coverage was that the hotel, which maybe nobody knew before this pseudo-event was staged, had in fact a high prestige.

According to Boorstin, the main characteristics of Pseudo-Events are:

1. It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.
2. It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media. Its success is measured by how widely it is reported. Time relations in it are commonly fictitious or factitious; the announcement is given out in advance “for future release” and written as if the event had occurred in the past. The question, “Is it real?” is less important than, “Is it newsworthy?”
3. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Its interest arises largely from this very ambiguity. Concerning a pseudo-event the question, “What does it mean?” has a new dimension. While the news interest in a train wreck is in what happened and in the real consequences, the interest in an interview is always, in a sense, in whether it really happened and in what might have been the motives. Did the statement really mean what it said? Without some of this ambiguity a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting.
4. Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hotel’s thirtieth-anniversary celebration, by saying that the hotel is a distinguished institution, actually makes it one.

Daniel Boorstin’s book was prophetic. The author was able to foresee that pseudo-events will become increasingly relevant in the mass communication society. Nowadays almost 70 % of the news we get from the different media (newspapers, magazines, TV or radio stations) is the result of some kind of pseudo-event.

Examples of pseudo-events are press conferences, personal appearances, awards ceremonies, electoral debates, etc…

Boorstin also explained the reasons why pseudo-events are overshadowing spontaneous events in the media:

1. Pseudo-events are more dramatic. A television debate between candidates can be planned to be more suspenseful (for example, by reserving questions which are then popped suddenly) than a casual encounter or consecutive formal speeches planned by each separately.
2. Pseudo-events, being planned for dissemination, are easier to disseminate and to make vivid. Participants are selected for their newsworthy and dramatic interest.
3. Pseudo-events can be repeated at will, and thus their impression can be re-enforced.
4. Pseudo-events cost money to create; hence somebody has an interest in disseminating, magnifying, advertising, and extolling them as events worth watching or worth believing. They are therefore advertised in advance, and rerun in order to get money’s worth.
5. Pseudo-events, are easy to understand. Being planned for intelligibility, are more intelligible and hence more reassuring. Even if we cannot discuss intelligently the qualifications of the candidates or the complicated issues, we can at least judge the effectiveness of a television performance. How comforting to have some political matter we can grasp!
6. Pseudo-events are more sociable, more conversable, and more convenient to witness. Their occurrence is planned for our convenience. The Sunday newspaper appears when we have a lazy morning for it. Television programs appear when we are ready with our glass of beer. In the office the next morning Jack Paar’s (or any other star performer’s) regular late-night show at the usual hour will overshadow in conversation a casual event that suddenly came up and had to find its way into the news.
7. Knowledge of pseudo-events–of what has been reported, or what has been staged, and how–becomes the test of being “informed.” News magazines provide us regularly with quiz questions concerning not what has happened but concerning “names m the news”–what has been reported in the news magazines. Pseudo-events begin to provide that “common discourse” which some of my old-fashioned friends have hoped to find in the Great Books.
8. Finally, pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events in geometric progression. They dominate our consciousness simply because there are more of them, and ever more.

Other Theoretical Frameworks

Social Learning Theory

Another important theoretical framework in the research of Mass-Media Effects is the so-called SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY, developed by Albert Bandura and associates.

The main statement of this theory is that we learn how to act in private and public settings observing the behavior of the people in movies or TV. The process is known as modeling (or imitation). Modeling goes throughout one’s lifetime, but it is especially important during the formative years of childhood. Bandura et al. showed that, for instance, the more stars smoke on the screen, the more popular smoking became among the population.

It is interesting, in this regard, to compare the screen behavior of the 1940ies and 50ies on the screen (Humphrey Bogart is the best example) with the behavior of contemporary Hollywood icons.

Cultivation Effect

George Gerbner and associates discovered in the nineties the CULTIVATION EFFECT of mass media.

This theory goes a step forward regarding other theories.

It says that our perception of the reality is determined by our Media Use. The more we watch TV, The more we think that the reality is like what we see on the screen. Heavy Media users, for example, overrate the violence in our society, even if they never were victims of violence themselves. They think that the percentage of Doctors and Policemen is much bigger than in reality, because Doctors and Policemen are over-represented in TV and movies.

Or that there are much more cases of adultery than in reality.

One of the consequences of the cultivation effect of mass media is what Gerbner called “Mean World Syndrome”. Since bad news are overrepresented in the media, and since violence plays also a essential role in movies and TV shows, people tend to believe that the world is a much more violent and evil place to live than it is in reality.

Lessons for Strategic Communication

Which Effect may have these two theories for our field?

The discussed theories show that we tend to act as we learn through movies and TV shows. The media also determine the way we perceive the reality.

Those facts have been inciting PR practitioners to look for new pipelines into the mind of their target audiences.

One of the contemporary fashions in marketing communication, product placement, is a good example of this process of adaptation to the rules of the media.

Product placement is simply the appearance of actual products and brand in the fictional world of TV shows and movies. You may remember examples of actual brands that you were able to recognize in some movies.

Pioneer in this field was the genius of Steven Spielberg, who in 1982 let his extraterrestrial character (E.T.) almost become addicted to Reese’s Pieces. Nowadays, companies are paying millions of dollars for introducing their products in Movies, TV series, etc…

External Conditions

Communication Conditions:

Ries and Trout, in his classic “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind”, speak about an overcommunicated society.

Nowadays, we, all citizens of the civilized world, are suffering a terrible communication overload. The amount of information we are exposed to is simply overwhelming.

Some data you may find interesting:

• More information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5000 years.
• The total of all printed knowledge doubles every four or five years.

• More than 4000 books are published around the world every day.
• The average white-collar office worker uses 250 pounds of copy paper a year. That’s twice the amount consumed 10 years ago.
• More than 4000 books are published around the world every day.
• New York Times (Sunday Edition) contains about 500,000 words. To read the whole newspaper, you will need almost 100 hours.
• 96% of all TV households can receive 20 or more TV stations.
• The average American Family watches Television more than 7 hours a day (51 hours a week)

Plus, there is also a communication overload due to the persuasion industries:

• America represents a 6% of the world population, but it consumes 57% of world advertising.
• The USA government spent in 1999 almost 230 Millions in Advertising.
• General Motors spends every year more than $ 178 millions to promote Chevrolet (That is $ 487,000 a day, $ 20,000 an hour)

The consequence of this overwhelming amount of information is that the individual has to consciously or unconsciously defend himself against it.

The reaction of the individual against the overcommunicated society is, according to Ries and Trout, the Oversimplified Mind.

Neurologists, studying the human brain, have found an interesting phenomenon that they call “Sensory Overload”. That means that we can just receive a limited amount of sensation, of sensorial stimuli, and that beyond a certain point, our brain goes blank and refuses to work any more.
To avoid this collapse, the individual has to filter the information that comes to him.

Therefore, Ries and Trout states that:
“We are publishing more than ever, but we are reading less than ever.”

This oversimplified Mind has also consequences for those who work in the communication industries.
And the most important consequences is, as stated by Ries and Trout, the Oversimplified Message.

If you want to get heard in this overcommunicated society, you will have to sharpen your messages, to reduce or eliminate ambiguity – and above all to simplify the message.

Another important consequence of the simplification of the audience mind for the communication professional is the Dominance of the Visual Communication

Click here to see an example of how visual communication is becoming more and more relevant.

Market Conditions: Market Segmentation

The market is segmented according to age, social status, psychological disposition, profession, life style, etc.

The different market segments are progressively shrinking. They are becoming smaller and smaller.

Therefore, it is necessary to accurately define your target audience before the creative process begins.

If you click here, you can see the development of the toothpaste market since 1950.

Target audiences are clusters of individuals, groups or organizations that can be defined by
–similar demographic characteristics (geographic location, socio-economic status, profession, education level, media usage, …)
–Similar level of awareness, knowledge, interest, involvement, beliefs, attitudes or behaviors

In this regard, it is necessary to discuss the term “Least Group Size”.
This concept refers to the necessity of finding a balance between the ability of our messages to adapt to the members of our target audiences and the significance of those messages’ impact. We have to make sure that, when we define our target audience, it is small enough so that the message is adapted to the characteristics of all those members. The larger the target audience, obviously, the more difficult it is to tailor messages to all its members. On the other hand, we have to make sure that the audience is large enough to guarantee a significant impact. It would not make sense to create a whole campaign to reach a too small group of people.

Social Conditions:

When we talk about social conditions we refer, first of all, to the law. When dealing with public communication, you will always have to take in account the legal limits (for example, deceptive advertising, for instance, you have the law protects children and childhood.) Then, you will have to cautiously scrutiny public opinion.

In our 4th learning module, we defined public opinion as

“The dynamic social instance that determines the ethical and esthetical values in every society”.

Public opinion is dynamic because it is constantly changing.
One of our concerns as strategic communicators is to avoid irritation.

In professional communication, we talk about irritation when the message may break the unspoken laws of public opinion or offend the sensibility of the more concrete public that represents your target audience.

In that happens, our messages can cause a “boomerang effect”, which simply means that the campaign has the contrary effect to what we had planned.

The dilemma of professional communicators in an overcommunicated society is that they are forced to be extremely aggressive in order to get the attention of their publics. On the other hand, they need to be extremely cautious because aggressive messages migh cause irritation.

In this link, you will see some images of the controversial United Colors of Benetton’s campaign. In some European countries (such as Germany or Holland), Benetton’s stores were boycotted. In some cases, radical activists threw stones to shop windows and billboards.
Click on these links to see other examples of irritating commercials