By Vladimir Bosanac

What got me interested in Media Marketing? I can’t quite put my finger on it. I love movies. I love television. I love to read a good magazine. Also, movie stars and entertainers generally intrigue me. So last semester I told myself to go ahead and take a class in something that I like for a change. And there I was, sitting in a classroom on Thursday nights getting ready to analyze why media properties, such as Superman and Seinfeld, have become hits and how an integrated marketing process ensures they sustain success.

Just what makes a media property a hit? How does it become successful and how does it sustain that success not through just one season, but across generations who have a totally different perception of the property? The following five ideas that I picked up in Professor Bobby Calder’s Media Marketing class are essential in attempting to answer these questions. They provide an excellent framework and point of reference for someone interested in pursuing a career in the media.

• Concept
The concept of a media property is its founding stone. The concept is not only a simple description of the property, but also a roadmap for the property to utilize as it crosses media. The concept is the basic description of what is going on and why. It can be short sentence, like in Seinfeld, “a show about nothing,” or it could have a deeper and more profound description that describes in detail what will happen and who the main characters are. However, the concept does not have to be explicit. It could imply an idea, like relaxation or escape. Country Living is a magazine whose implicit concept is just that — a place that does not exist in my hectic world, and a place where I can go to get away from it all.

• Relevance
So, now that we have the concept of the property, why should I care about it? Why is it relevant to me? Not just in a sense that arriving to work before 9 a.m. is relevant, but in a way that it touches upon something in my life. For instance, I live a very hectic life, and I find it difficult to find time to go on vacations that are longer than three-day weekends. By buying Traveler magazine, I am vicariously transported to those places I aspire to visit one day. However, the relevancy of the concept does not end there. The property also has to be culturally relevant to me and to my peers. A brand of jeans is popular to wear only because everyone else perceives that brand to be cool. It has to mean something to the group to which I belong, and it has to mean something to us at an appropriate point in time. A movie about firefighters has taken on a whole new meaning after September of 2001, for instance.

• Brand design
Understanding that a brand is not a name or a person, but rather an idea or a representation that the consumers hold in their minds, is the key to understanding marketing. Brand design pertains to the visual and verbal expressions of the property that their owners create in the eyes of the consumers. In short, it is an effort to manage the perceptions and ideas of the viewers or readers. And that management is very important if a property wants to maintain its hit vitality beyond one generation and one time.

• Points of contact
Points of contact describe the ways that a brand touches people. This could be the way Superman touches young people though its comic books. Superman also touches people when they go to Six Flags and ride the rollercoaster of the same name. Points of contact convey the brand, the concept and the relevance of a media property to people, and it is through them that the brand design is conveyed and ideas of the property formed.

• Synergy
When a brand can be experienced through multiple points of contact without any dilution of its concept or relevance, synergy is achieved. When Country Living magazine tried to introduce its Healthy Living magazine, it was a miserable failure. While Healthy Living focused on finding a balance in a hectic urban life, Country Living focused on getting you out of that life into the country where everything seemed a little different. Pushing readers to eat healthier and to exercise more did not provide the escape they needed from their every-day lives. Country Living’s concept did not transfer through this new point of contact, and it became irrelevant as result.

In approaching media properties, one must be able to understand how these five ideas interconnect with each other. An integrated marketing process merges this framework together into a guideline that any aspiring media major should understand and follow.