Research in Media Promotion

This collection examines research on the promotion of television and radio programmes. On-air and print promotion share characteristics with advertising messages and with programming, but promotion occupies a special place in industry and in theory. Each chapter in this volume includes an extensive review of the literature, an original study of some aspect of promotion, and an extended discussion of questions that should be explored in subsequent research. This structure makes the book useful for stimulating additional research studies by graduate students. The book provides both a broad background in the opening chapters and specific applications to particular media. After an orienting chapter, the chapter topics in part 1 include theory, structure and content, sex and violence in promotion, and media branding. Part 2 contains applications to the specific media of children's television, sports, news, movies, radio and the Internet. Presenting recent research and theory in media promotion and exploring future directions, this book: provides discussions of several theories that can be utilized to explain the impact of promotion, suitable for elucidation in subsequent studies; features extended reviews of the literature in ten areas; contains nine original studies exploring different kinds of promotion, using widely diverse methods and approaches; supplies a wealth of ideas for follow-up studies and suggestions of new areas for exploration; includes many tables, bar graphs and pie charts illustrating the findings - suitable for reproduction on overhead transparencies or in Power Point for class discussion; and presents an extended bibliography in each chapter, reaching into the scholarly advertising and marketing literature, the academic programming literature, and the industry's trade reports and articles.