Investing media: institutions key concepts

Key Concepts Help

Synthetic personalization: the process of using a character to represent an organization. The character’s behaviour, dress, diction, lexis, looks and age are carefully constructed to project a set values about the organisation to its consumers

Kinds of institution:

·       Public service broadcasters (PSB’s) are there to serve the interests of consumers. They usually aren’t driven by commercial imperatives, serve minority audiences, and make positive representations of minority groups. The biggest PSB in the UK are the BBC.

·       Commercial broadcasters: have to make money – they are funded through advertising and therefore have to attract mass audiences to their products. Commercial broadcasters in the UK often operate on very tight budgets.

·       Advertising: sell products to consumers, often employ innovative story telling techniques or use available technologies in innovative ways to focus consumer attention. Advertising can utilize incredibly high production values.

BBC Public purposes: these are set of six overarching aims the BBC sets itself in order to fulfill its remit as a public broadcaster. The six public purposes are sited by the BBC as evidence for its continued use of the license fee as its funding mechanism

Advertising positioning:

·       Symbolic positioning: the deployment of role models/aspirational characters or positioning a product so it gives status to a consumer. When products are positioned symbolically they create a ‘windows to the future self’.

·       Functional positioning: highlights the practical benefits of a product to its consumers

·       Experiential positioning: tries to convey the effects of consumption. Experiential positioning often highlights physical senses or emotional sensations.

Production values: the amount spent in the realization of product. Production values can often by indicative of the type organisation producing the media text.

Tone: serious, comic, down beat, apathetic, energized, clean…what emotional content does the product convey. Quite often tone of the product matches the brand values that an organisation wants to project about itself.

Problem/solution narrative: often commercial work poses problems that only their products can solve.