ABSTRACT
The problem of TV versus print is still with us, as the commercial media debate which is more memorable. It should have been granted long ago that this was not television's prime virtue and that its advertising is not memorable, at least not without much repetition and reinforcement. The Gallup Total Prime Time measurement service set up some years ago in Philadelphia to report next-day recall of TV commercials went out of business, in part because advertisers could not, presumably did not want to, believe the reported low levels of commercial recall, i.e., of commercials which were known to have been seen by the viewer. Memorability or recall is an appropriate criterion for a thought-provoking medium like print, but not for TV, which is a medium that importantly provokes something else of equal value. Rather than force the use of common criteria we must first acknowledge that each medium requires its own research procedures. This is a critical way for the research to acknowledge that the media do perform different jobs.
