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Media Dictionary
- Campaign: An advertising or direct mail program in market during a given period of time, typically with numerous media components. See Flight.
- Car Cards / Train Cards: In outdoor advertising, displays of various sizes posted inside buses, subways and commuter trains.
- Channel capacity: In cable television, the number of channels available for current or future use within a cable system.
- Checking: Physical inspection of a market to ensure advertising delivery meets expectations.
- Churn: New customers minus lost customers. Churn is typically measured if a company or organization faces overall losses in its customer base, for example, gaining 10% new customers per year and losing 30% of current customers per year for a net loss of -20% of its total customers. Churn is common in industries with subscription models and numerous competitors, such as cell phone service or home heating oil delivery.
- Circulation: The number of copies of a magazine or newspaper produced and distributed. Circulation includes all manners of distribution, such as subscriptions, newsstand sales, etc. See Readership.
- Click Fraud: The fraudulent practice of clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs for advertising.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percent of users who receive an online ad impression who click on (or click through) the ad. CTR is calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
- Close Rate: In marketing and sales, the percent of leads or inquiries that convert to purchasing the service of product. If a sales manager has 100 leads and signs up 30 new customers, she has a close rate of 30%.
- Collaborative Filtering: An approach for making automatic predictions ("filtering") for a user by collecting information from many other users ("collaborating"). Examples include book, music or video recommendations that appear on web sites such as Amazon.com and Netflix.com. This approach is based on the idea that people who agree in the past tend to agree in the future. For example, if a consumer has rented drama films A, B, and C, and similar users had rented drama films A, B, C and D, the film "D" might be recommended to the consumer as the next suggested film rental.
- Competitive Strategy: An approach developed by Michael Porter in which a business has three options for achieving a "competitive advantage": Cost leadership, differentiation, or focus. This model was expanded by other business writers to create a triad of competitive positions, in which a business should focus on either (a) being the most efficient or lowest-cost provider (e.g. Wal-Mart), (b) being the most customer service-oriented firm that provides a wide range of customized solutions (e.g. Charles Schwab financial advisors), or (c) focusing on leadership and innovation in a product category (e.g. Intel computer chips). Competing companies in the same industry can take different competitive strategies; for example, Apple is a product innovator while Microsoft provides a broader range of customer service solutions.
- Composition: The demographic description of an audience.
- Contextual Advertising: In online advertising, the display of ads with graphics or text that match either keywords (search phrases) typed in by the site user or the content of the web site page. For example, a reader of a web site page that contains news about financial planning might be served a banner ad for a financial planning service.
- Conversion Rate: In online advertising, the percent of users who reach a transaction page and then complete the transaction. If 1 out of 20 users who visit an e-commerce site complete a transaction, the site has a conversion rate of 5%.
- Cost Per Action (CPA): An online advertising payment model where the advertiser pays only after a user completes a desired action, such as a purchase or completing a lead form.
- Cost Per Click (CPC): An online advertising payment model where the advertiser pays each time a user clicks on the ad.
- Cost Per Point (CPP): The cost of making an impression on 1 percent of the total population (the cost of 1 GRP).
- Cost per Thousand (CPM): The cost to make 1,000 impressions on the target audience. The acronym originally stood for Cost Per Mille, hence "CPM." (In online advertising, CPM is a payment model in which advertisers pay a fixed rate per 1,000 online ad impressions.)
- Coverage: The number of different people or homes reached.
- Coverage Area: In cable television, the geographic area in which the cable system runs commercials.
- Creative: In the advertising industry, "creative" refers to the design of branding, messaging, layout, graphics, photos, video, scripts, copy, and the production and post-production required to finalize the advertisement image and sound. Creative does not include the planning of media outlets, forecasting of media impressions, or execution of placing orders into media vehicles. See Media Planning / Media Buying.
- Cume Persons: The estimated number of different (non-duplicative) people who listen to a radio station for five minutes in a given quarter hour.
- Cume Rating: Cume Persons (non-duplicative people who listen for five minutes in a quarter hour) expressed as a percent of the total listening population.
- Cut-Outs / Extensions: In outdoor advertising, a temporary addition to the billboard structure that can include letters, graphics, etc., designed to capture greater viewer attention.
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