ABSTRACT
Television provides access to the majority of homes and, therefore, to the largest audience; however, it now competes with digital signage on websites and real-time advertising offered by browsers. This alters the relationship of advertising to content and to media channels that sell around that content. It allows advertisers to assign value to media rather than publishers, who can no longer control the price even though they can control the quality of the content and the audience on a given site. 1 Before broadcast television, few people had dealt with the pressure to communicate product or commercial information in the rapid, attention-getting way that television advertising requires. Although television and cable advertising are still alive and well, they now compete more and more with digital
signage on the web. Airtime was, and still is, very expensive to buy. Because television is the most expensive advertising medium, it has driven the writers and producers of commercials to refine their techniques so as to deliver a complete message in a short amount of time. The cost of this time on air far exceeds the cost of producing the message itself.
