Subliminal messaging

Subliminal messaging is the use of stimuli to influence a person into believing something without the person being aware.

Subliminal messaging can be done through:


Visual

This is done by showing pictures that will change the viewers attitude. Humans respond to different colours, words, geometric shapes in different ways and it raises a feeling or emotion.
Different cultures however have different meanings for colours and shapes, for example white would never be used in a Chinese wedding as it symbolizes death. Some shapes, can raise sexual arousal while others are intrusive.

Auditory

Auditory stimuli is not as affective as visual but it too can have an effect. Self help audio recordings for example all use a similar tone of voice which is meant to persuade the listener into thinking positively.

Other studies have been done on baroque music and other forms of classical music that evokes the memory and allows the listener to remember an advert better.

A third, less commonly used subliminal message is smells. In America, they sell a can of "freshly baked cookies" smell which real estate agents can spray around a house to induce a feeling in the buyers that a family could live there, bake cookies and be happy.

Subliminal messaging is illegal, however regular advertising which could use similar visual or auditory stimuli are legal. You cannot have a coke bottle pop up for a millisecond on a screen but you can show how drinking coke could change your life because you are aware you're watching an advert.

KFC for example hid a message in one of their adverts and whoever cracked it, won a free gift certificate. This got people to watch the KFC advert much more often than they actually would, instilling their brand in our heads.

Corona beer has never traditionally used lime in its beer until a bartender came up with the trick. Now we associate lime and beer with Corona, every time.

Social Media

The buzzword "social media" is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn for example.

Social media usually works by attracting the attention of the viewers, creating interesting content and persuading people to share the links. Social media is the new word of mouth. Social media marketing is also considered "earned media" rather than "paid media" as you need traffic to get attention to the site.

Social media also uses a lot of "link baiting" which in my opinion shouldn't be used on news channels for example as its only purpose is to get people to click on the links just to get a bit of information. Some examples might be, "This dog was let out and you will never guess what happens NEXT!". They make people click on them because even if we didn't care about what happens next, we need to know. It becomes rather distasteful when CNN uses link baiting which could say, "This bomb fell on Tehran, you'll never guess what happens next!".

Purpose of social media:

The purpose of social media to create the products and services of a company more accessible by putting them on a medium which is easily discovered and viewed by all sorts of people.

Implementing a social media strategy:

Define your goals
You need to decide as a business what you want to achieve out of social media, what are your goals or general branding purpose? Do you want to interact with your audience or would you like to promote a new product or coupon?

Know your audience
It is important, like in all forms of marketing to understand your audience. This way you can create a marketing plan that targets that specific audience and captures their attention. If you market a car to people who enjoy cycling, you are just wasting valuable resources.

 Platform
 In addition to knowing you audience, you need to know which platform that specific audience uses. If it's a business to business advertisement it may be better to use LinkedIn. Also, things like job applications are also important to put on LinkedIn rather than Facebook to get the people that the business actually wants.

If you want to gain recognition or just to announce what is happening in your business, twitter is a good tool for that. Twitter allows you to link a few aspects to the main point of your advertisement or announcement. 

Plan your content and maintain it
It is important to have planned content, this way you can build on that content if it becomes viral or popular on the internet. It is vital to create a plan instead of willy nilly putting up things just for the sake of getting a couple of views.

While you have planned your content, this content should be updated continuously which keeps the potential customers informed and keen in the products.

To achieve a good plan and well kept upkeep it may be a good idea to hire a social media manager. Social media is a very effective way to promote your business and if done right you can get a lot out of it at a relatively low cost.

Media Agencies

Media agencies make sure a marketing message appeals to consumers, appears in the right place, at the right time and that the advertiser pays the best possible price.

Media agencies are a third party contractor that a company hires to find the best possible options for a company to promote their product or service.

Tasks:

It is the media agencies task to find the most effective way of targeting a specific audience. The contracting party usually tells them who they want to target and with what product or service. It is then the media agencies task to find out which medium to use to get the message to the target audience the most effectively.

Media agencies try to understand consumer behavior and this way they can use their knowledge to help them. The media agency is in close contact with the client and their brand directors in order to get that same brand message across through all their contact with customers.

Benefits:

Media agencies allow companies to really understand the behavior of their customers. By outsourcing the above mentioned tasks they can safely asume that majority of whom they have wanted to reach, have been reached.

Media agencies also understand the latest in media technology. What trends to follow and which to avoid, for example promoting yourself on MySpace circa 2004 was probably seen as a pretty bad idea but that may have not been clear to many companies.

Media agencies understand who is following which media and they can use this to their benefit. It's also a cost saver as pumping money into a media channel that isn't followed by your target audience would be wasteful.

Deals, media agencies know where to buy ad space and at what costs. Like everything, experience allows you to make smarter decisions and this also holds water when purchasing something.

Disadvantages:

Of course, media agencies can be set in their own ways too. It can be detrimental to a company to outsource a media agency that constantly does the same thing for clients. Rinse & repeat doesn't work anymore, there are too many different ways of gaining information and it's vital to have knowledge in who is using what.

Intramedia: Between 
Intermedia: Within