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This paper explores how firms within the audience measurement industry, specifically its radio and television markets, have navigated myriad market and nonmarket challenges. The market strategies and the nonmarket forces that constrain those strategies are largely defined by two features: the delineation of its geographic markets by political boundaries and markets that have natural monopoly characteristics. While the pre-monopoly stage or periods of competition may be comparatively short-lived, they are still telling. Monopolists undertake market strategies designed to ensure that they are not supplanted and nonmarket actions geared to avoiding undesirable constraints and reputational damage. Depending on their legal and regulatory environment, customers of the measurement services have used both market and nonmarket actions to mitigate the market power of the audience measurement firms. This paper focuses primarily on the U.S. radio and television audience measurement markets that Arbitron and Nielsen, respectively, have dominated for decades. Non-U.S. markets, which frequently feature America’s foremost firms, illustrate alternatives to America’s largely laissez-faire approach.

It is generally recognised that companies spend approximately 50% of their marketing budget on promotional activities. Advertising belongs to the most visible areas of a company’s activity. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the average recipient associates marketing with advertising, competitions and leaflets about new promotions delivered to houses or offices. Advertising, especially Internet advertising, is one of the most effective forms of marketing and one of the fastest developing areas of business. New channels of communication are emerging all the time – the Internet, digital television, mobile telephony; accompanied by new forms, such as the so-called ambient media. Advertising benefits from the achievements of many fields of science, that is, psychology, sociology, statistics, medicine and economics. At the same time, it combines science and the arts – it requires both knowledge and intuition. Contemporary advertising has different forms and areas of activity; yet it is always closely linked with the operations of a company – it is a form of marketing communication.

The indices of marketing communication presented in this chapter are generally known and used not only by advertising agencies but also by the marketing departments of many organisations. Brand awareness, advertising scope and frequency, the penetration index or the response rate belong to the most widely used indices; others, like the conversion rate or the affinity index, will get increasingly more significant along with the process of professionalisation of the environment of marketing specialists in Poland and with increased pressure on measuring marketing activities. Marketing indices are used for not only planning activities, but also their evaluation; some of them, such as telemarketing, mailing and coupons, provide an extensive array of possibilities of performance evaluation.

This chapter offers an historical overview and analysis of US broadcast regulation. It demonstrates how seemingly race-neutral policies – the interpretation of “public interest,” the preference for incumbents, the application of the First Amendment, and the embrace of colorblindness within US media policy – has functioned to entrench White interests in the broadcasting sector. Drawing on critical policy studies and critical race theory, this chapter illuminates how broadcast regulation has been a technology of White privilege, one that has had substantial consequences for the distribution of both material and symbolic resources as well as for the contours of the public sphere in the United States.

Efforts to make the television landscape more equitable for people of color have been evident both within and outside the industry as early as the 1940s. These advancements made by individuals within broadcasting were an attempt to allow more people of color to get opportunities to prove themselves competent in front of and behind the scenes in broadcast television. While these early attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, they laid the groundwork for future diversity initiative efforts. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the landmark events that introduced changes in diversity policy that eventually resulted from diversity initiatives at NBC despite the racial barriers within its corporate structure. This chapter will show that the trajectory of these early events exhibits that the diversity initiatives seen today resulted from decades of pressure from the government, the press and outside citizen activist groups.

This chapter discusses the significance and effectiveness of communication strategies in empowering marginalized communities. With a specific focus on reproductive health, this chapter examines the diverse scope of these strategies and their transformative potential. It explores the use of mass media as a dynamic tool for information dissemination and the adoption of information, education, and communication (IEC) approaches to enhance knowledge and awareness. Furthermore, this chapter highlights the catalytic role of social and behavior change communication (SBCC) in driving substantial transformations in behaviors and attitudes. An integral part of the discussion is the customization of communication strategies to effectively reach and empower marginalized communities in Bangladesh. Through these strategies, this chapter illuminates the path toward empowering marginalized communities.

Purpose: Previous research has found that people’s trust in a source of information affects whether they will expose themselves to information from that source, pay attention to that source, and the likelihood that they will act on the information obtained from that source. This study tracked trends in levels of trust in different health information sources over time and investigated sociodemographic predictors of trust in these sources.

Methodology/Approach: Data were drawn from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), a nationally representative, cross-sectional survey of adults in the USA. Weighted percentages, means, and standard errors for trust in health information sources were computed using data from four iterations of the survey (2005, 2009, 2012, and 2013). Weighted multivariable logistic regression models were employed to investigate associations between sociodemographic variables and level of trust in health information sources using HINTS 2013 data.

Findings: Trend analyses revealed declining trust in “traditional” mass media channels, such as television and radio, for health information and consistently high trust in interpersonal sources, like physicians, over the past decade. Regression analyses showed that those with more education (ORs 2.93–4.59, p < 0.05) and higher incomes (ORs 1.65–2.09, p < 0.05) were more likely to trust the Internet for health information than those with less education and lower incomes. Non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics were more likely to trust mass media channels in comparison to Non-Hispanic Whites (ORs 1.73–2.20, p < 0.05).

Implications: These findings can be used to inform the strategic selection of channels for disseminating health information to certain demographic groups.

This chapter presents an overview of the Brazilian regional media groups that are characterized by cross-ownership of media outlets in the four main reference platforms for news coverage: daily print, radio, broadcast television, and Web.

The research uses institutional documents to explore the history and operating mode of the groups that own the 50 best-selling newspapers in the country. The theoretical approach is guided by the notion of “spatialization” applied to business communication by Vincent Mosco, and by the concepts of “region,” “regionality,” and “regionalization” based upon authors aligned with the critical thinking approach in the field of geography.

The study identifies the multiple geographical scales at which these groups operate, as well as their dominant business models and the sources of their owners’ capital. Based on this analysis, it argues that the variables which are applied to the large-circulation media at a national level cannot be automatically transferred to the regional and local levels.

The study of regional media reveals a landscape that has not received adequate attention from communications researchers worldwide. It also points to problems which deserve more investigation and elaboration. This represents a new challenge for media studies, for the political economy of communication, and for the nascent field of geography of communication.

This chapter provides a distinctive and nuanced approach to the Brazilian media system. It can inspire other studies on regional communication which take into account the specificities of their geographic scales.