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Narrowcasting, Nontraditional advertising, and Innovative media technologies

Narrowcasting

“Narrowcasting refers to broadcasting to a very narrow range of audience” (Franck Legendre et al., 2008, p.1) from this definition, it’s a communication for limited audience that interested to receive information from a specific source, it includes all media that can be restricted for limited subscribers, by other words, narrowcasting media not broadcasting to public, a special subscription or registration method must be completed before accessing to the source media. Simple example can be a website, when broadcasting some contents to all visitors while restricting some contents only for registered users that interested to view that content. Other popular examples are Cable TV, Channel Decoders, Mailing List, or any other media that only some audience can access them.

Subscribed audience of Narrowcasting media can also be identified as target market for advertisement, it can be considered also as effective way because audiences that subscribed to that media are interested to receive information from that source; the media might also be created for a specific people that became as an audiences for that source, thus, if the audiences found as target customers for a specific product/service, narrowcasting source will be effective for disseminating advertisement messages.

Nontraditional advertising

Any advertisement that not used by traditional methods like (TV, Radio, Website, Newspapers, Brochure, Trade shows, etc) can be categorized as nontraditional advertising, simple examples are some arts that attract viewers on the street; behind that attractive point, a company puts name, logo, or any things that shows the brand of that company, in my country, the first non-traditional advertising showed via some known actors that presented an attractive scenario on the street; suddenly, without any expectation of people around them. Another example is complex paint art, created by some professional that the content only identified 20 meters away, and also a message typed: “Check your eyes in ABC Company”.

Some examples that provided by “www.gogorillamedia.com” are: “Stickering, Placemat Advertising, Mural Advertising, Peephole Advertising, Coffee Cup Advertising, Chinese Restaurant Advertising, Youth Marketing, Outside the Box Advertising” that each category consists of more than one scenario for targeting specific target.

Advertisements via non-traditional ways can be designed very attractive so that viewers might not willing to ignore it, and also, it gives a freedom that viewer can ignore it not like some TV ads that takes 10 minutes between each 30 minutes, it’s also cheaper that all other methods relatively.

Innovative media technologies are mostly used as light-banners, posters, or any other technologies that not common, generally, innovative methods are using visual affects to attract viewers, one example that used in Japan, uses very attractive water display.

Innovative media technologies can also be used as non-traditional advertisement also as some examples provided by advense.com by creating special project by using innovative technologies.

References:

  • Franck Legendre, Vincent Lenders, Martin May, and Gunnar Karlsson (2008) Narrowcasting: An Empirical Performance Evaluation Study [Online]. Available From: http://www.lenders.ch/publications/conferences/chants08.pdf (Accessed: 10 December 2011)
  • GoGorilla (n.d.) Guerilla Marketing [Online]. Available From: http://www.gogorillamedia.com (Accessed: 10 December 2011)
  • ADVENSE (n.d.) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [Online]. Available From: http://www.advense.com/newmedia/el-lighting-clothes-accessories.html (Accessed: 10 December 2011)

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