Cable Advertising

The attraction of cable advertising is simple: visuals often communicate a better message than words. A tight shot can detail fine craftsmanship. A wide pan of vehicles on the lot entices the viewer with options. A professionally produced television commercial brings products and services to life in a variety of ways for the cable audience.

Developing an Advertising Plan is the best way to forecast the various stages of marketing for your business. Your plan will also guide your budgetary decisions.

Cable advertising is broken down into many options used to reach a specific audience, including:

• Geographic zones
• Demographic zones
• Local cable
• National cable

Many forms of broadcast advertising can be expensive, but as a mass outlet, it’s often the best way to reach thousands of potential customers at once. To be successful, the formula is this reach combined with frequency, which is how often viewers will receive your message.

Businesses that often experience success with cable advertising include automotive-related products, beverages, financial services, insurance, medical services/products, organizations/politics, real estate, various forms of restaurants and retail and telecommunications.

Like any industry, cable television has very specific business terms. Here are a few that will come up quite frequently as you’re planning your ad campaign.

• Adjacency: Placing your ad before or after a specific program
• "Avail," or availability: the timeslot in which your commercial will be placed
• Coverage: viewers within the range of the broadcast signal
• Daypart: divided segments throughout the broadcast day
• Flight: placement and length of time your advertising will run on the station
• Spot: the commercial
• Storyboard: the flow of how a television ad will look in action and words, set in frames

To better understand broadcast terminology, view a more comprehensive list here: Cable Advertising Terminology

To isolate the best times to broadcast your message, the local or national cable representative will provide a demographic breakdown of its viewers’ channel preferences and viewing patterns. Primetime and week-weekend daytime avails are usually the most popular dayparts and, consequently, the most expensive.

However, depending on your message and advertising plan, other dayparts or adjacencies may prove to be just as successful. General awareness campaigns, for example, will benefit from having advertising on the right station at any particular time, a flight called “run of station,” and are far less pricey than primetime.

Additional options might be to sponsor a certain program or feature to build awareness with a very specific block of viewers.

Your account executive should be very clear with strategies and have documentation, like ratings results, audience flow patterns and case studies to back up any suggestions.

Selecting a visual medium to broadcast your company is a great way to have an immediate impact on your target audience. Cable companies have a staff of creative writers, camera operators, lighting specialists and broadcast producers trained to create effective cable advertising.

Resist the urge to be in the ad unless your image is imperative to the branding of your business: use other customers, the products, the service in action and the atmosphere.

Your primary job in the process is to clearly identify your objectives for advertising, provide details of the message and express the desired results from the effort. With this information, called “copy points,” the creative staff will develop an ad to accomplish the objectives.

A handful of general rules to follow in ad development include length of the commercial (generally 15 or 30 seconds), the number of times the business is mentioned in that length, how the address/phone number is communicated and the like. Cable television producers use music to complement the ad, as well as technology to dissolve, fade and merge imagery, and selectively pace wording both in audio and on-screen to achieve effective communication.

But the most creative commercial will start with clear identification of the audience, how the product or service can benefit them and then placement of the message when they're most likely to view it. The sum of these components equals the best cable advertising.

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