Media Campaign Glossary: Terms From CDC's Media Campaign Resource Center

CDC's Media Campaign Resource Center (MCRC) offers tobacco-control ads that health organizations can license and run. This glossary covers the terms used on the MCRC site and in its answers about ads and costs, grouped by topic.

Ads and campaigns

• Ad (advertisement): one ad in the MCRC collection. It may come in several formats — print sizes or running times — and every ad has a title, theme and type.
• Advertising: delivering a persuasive message about a product, service or idea to many people at once through mass media.
• Campaign: an advertising effort for a product, service or issue that runs for a set time, aims at specific outcomes and reaches a large audience. It usually shares one theme and target audience across several media.
• Commercial: an audio or video ad of 3 minutes or less for television or radio — a public service announcement, a paid ad, or both.
• Spot: an ad, printed or broadcast.
• Execution: one specific ad; several executions can share a strategy. Execution style is its tone — hard-hitting, humorous, serious.
• Copy: any text in an ad. Body copy is the text in a print ad that explains the headline.
• Script: the written text of a video or radio ad — dialog, effects, stage directions.
• Camera ready: art or copy ready to go into a publication. A proof shows an ad as it will appear once printed or produced.
• Key message: the main idea — for example, the health harms of smoking or the benefits of quitting.
• Counter-advertising: campaigns that answer the tobacco industry's advertising with pro-health, anti-tobacco messages on television, radio, print, billboards and elsewhere.
• Counter-marketing: the broader effort against tobacco marketing — media advocacy, media relations, school programs, sponsorships and promotions, as well as paid counter-advertising.
• Supporting material: items that reinforce a campaign, such as toolkits, tent cards, promotional items, news releases, booklets, exhibits and web materials.

How MCRC describes an ad

Tags

A tag identifies the sponsoring organization or a local agency, often with a phone number or website.

• Tag time: the seconds left at the end of an ad for a tag. Tag notes hold any extra detail.
• Produced (recorded) tag: recorded in a studio and added to the end. A voiceover is a recorded tag heard in the final seconds.
• Live announcer tag: a station announcer reads your tag live after the recorded spot. A live announcer spot is a whole script read live.

Buying and measuring media

• Paid media: ads you pay to place, so you control where and what they say.
• Public service announcement (PSA): an ad placed free of charge for the public good, usually on television or radio under the PSA waiver in the SAG-AFTRA commercials contract.
• Media plan (media buy plan): the schedule of paid placements — programs and times, billboard sites and sizes, publications. Media strategy says how media will serve the marketing objectives.
• Flight: a period when a concentration of commercials airs.
• Reach: how many people or households see a message over a period, typically 4 weeks. Frequency is how many times, on average, they see it.
• Gross rating points (GRPs): the percentage of the audience reached multiplied by the number of times it may see the ad. 1,000 GRPs could mean 100% of the audience seeing 10 ads, or 50% seeing 20. Campaigns with high GRPs lower adult smoking and raise quit attempts; CDC's Best Practices 2014 suggests enough GRPs to reach 75% to 85% of the intended audience each quarter.
• Coverage: the percentage of households or people in an area who can receive a medium. Circulation is the number of copies a publication distributes.
• Network: stations linked by contract to broadcast programs at the same time.

Dayparts divide the broadcast day:

The source gives Central prime time as "7 a.m.–10 p.m."; it means 7 to 10 p.m.

Talent fees and usage

• Talent: the actors, voice performers and musicians in an ad.
• SAG-AFTRA: the union for actors, announcers and other media professionals, formed from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).
• Holding fees: paid to keep principal performers in paid television commercials, in 13-week cycles, whether or not the ad airs. Radio has none.
• Use fees: paid to performers on top of holding fees, based on the number of airplays and the number and size of markets.
• Ads in cycle: once the first holding, session and talent fees are paid, an ad is "in cycle" — other organizations can add their markets at a much lower cost until it expires. Only ads made under SAG-AFTRA contracts qualify.

Usage type says how you will use a video or radio ad:

The older categories Internet and New Media were phased out in 2023.

Print and outdoor

• Out-of-home: printed ads seen outside the home — billboards, taxis, bus shelters, the sides of buses, transit stations, airports and malls. Outdoor advertising means signs and billboards along streets and highways; a billboard is the common paper or vinyl roadside sign.
• Bus king: an ad on the outside of a bus. Bus shelter ads also appear in and around train stations.

Standard print sizes: 8½ × 11 inches (spread finishes at 11 × 17); 11 × 17 tabloid (spread finishes at 17 × 22); full page 7 × 9; half page 5½ × 8½ horizontal or 8½ × 5½ vertical; quarter page 5½ × 4¼. Many ads can be adjusted for slightly different page sizes.

Standard outdoor sizes:

Planning

• Goal: the overall improvement a program aims for. An objective is a measurable step toward it.
• Strategy: the plan for communicating an ad to best effect.
• Target market profile: a demographic and psychographic description of the audience.

One entry in the source, social media materials, actually defines unpaid "earned" coverage: getting stories covered through letters to the editor, op-eds, press conferences and work with reporters, rather than paying for placement.

Sources

Based on "MCRC: Glossary of Terms," Media Campaign Resource Center, Office on Smoking and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a work of the United States government in the public domain.