You may have heard his words before but never known that it came from a man named Bill Burton.

“An automobile is a radio with 4 wheels!”

“Be Fabulous!”

“Radio is the frequency medium and frequency is paramount in $elling”

Bill Burton was many things in his life, a military commander, a advertising mogul, a philanthropist but to me he was a mentor and friend. I believe the lessons I learned from him are necessary to effectively run any campaign.

A philosophy he embodied was that in order to achieve success, “your advertising program must not only be targeted toward the right prospects, it must also deliver your message enough times during the course of the purchase cycle to make a favorable impact on the consumer.”

Does this sound like a concept meant only for radio? Hardly,  I believe this is the basic concept behind building and grabbing  consumers’ attention.

This idea lead me to discover Recency Theory.

As defined by Audience Watch, Recency Theory states…

“Recency theory refers to the belief that advertisements and promotions are most effective when they air immediately prior to the time of decision, and that the influence of ad exposure diminishes with time. Exposure to fast food ads, for example, is optimal when it occurs just before dinnertime, and exposure to movie ads is best just prior to the movie release.”

If you think that Recency Theory is another theory I found in a dusty college advertising book, its not.

Erwin Ephron, the first person accredited with introducing this modern advertising/marketing principle, stated that it was necessary to reinvent (at the time) the core advertising concepts of frequency and reach in order to adapt to a rapidly changing global market. This was in 1995, during the first small steps of what we now know as the Internet.

It is not as simple as displaying your marketing campaign hours before shopping on Black Friday. Each of the primary social medium carry different weight on consumer interests and thoughts: television, mobile TV and the Internet.

Advertisers and marketers are well aware of this, in pursuit to grab our attention and more importantly, our money.

Research  in “The cross-platform synergies of the digital video advertising: Implications for cross-media campaigns in television, Internet and mobile TV” details the varying levels of impact each medium has on consumers’ opinions on such things as advertiser credibility, brand credibility, ad message and most importantly, purchase intention.

The Internet is said to be the most effective at influencing consumers decisions due to the high amount of cognitive effort each individual needs in order to effectively participate.

While “[o]n the other hand, television is most effective in influencing consumers without a lot of cognitive effort. Such complementary traits of two different media can contribute to create a [positive media] synergy effect”

Synergy as defined in Webster’s Dictionary means: a mutually advantageous conjunction or compatibility of distinct business participants or elements (as resources or efforts). In this case, lets call it a conjunction of media elements.

The overall purpose of the “synergy effect” is to help campaigns maintain relevancy to consumers by striking the central route within our conscious and shying away from hitting the peripheral route.

As described by its Psychologist architects,

• “The central route to persuasion consists of thoughtful consideration of the arguments (ideas, content) of the message.”
• “While The peripheral route to persuasion occurs when the listener decides whether to agree with the message based on other cues besides the strength of the arguments or ideas in the message.”

So what happens when there actually exists a  product  that combines these two mediums into one?

Introducing for the first time, the DMB! Well actually it is not that relatively new device. In 2005, the government of South Korea introduced Digital Media Broadcasting (DMB) . At the beginning, it was just government-sponsored stations providing quality television content to citizens such as news, entertainment, traffic updates with the primary purpose of warning citizens of inclement.

Over 90% of South Korea’s total population currently uses DMB, more commonly referred to as a “mobile TV” platform in research papers. As technologically has progressed and the overall global culture adjusts to the presence of social media, DMB has expanded into an advertisers dream.

But that is not what makes it so interesting to researchers and media companies, it is the fact that each active user in South Korea can individualize it to their own needs through the Internet. And now, its being incorporated into all domestically sold  phones in South Korea. Now users can watch a cooking channel and save their recipe on their on phone while taking the train back home.

So here we have it, a medium that takes the simulation and brings it to real life. With such a large focus group (almost an entire country), the social experiment and the data from it, is consistently showing that “any combinations of cross-media presentation yielded greater and more positive results for intended measure than simple repetitions on a single media.”

In essence, media companies are modernizing  to maximize marginal utility and minimize diminishing returns in today’s interconnected world. Our attention is what drives some companies towards new heights while others crash and burn.