Abstract:

Television is a mass medium which is intended for a large audience and aims to reach large markets. This also determines the content broadcasted, which is focused on a topic which will be of interest to a general audience. This also applies to TV commercials, where common consumer goods are usually advertised. Anyway most TV channels declare their specific audience profile which should help the advertisers within the targeting process to address the proper audience.The question is whether companies do distinguish between different audience profiles across TV channels and take it into account when considering placing a commercial. This paper analyzes the distribution of commercials among Czech TV channels in 2011 to determine if different audience profiles also reflect a different industry structure of aired commercials. Analysis is based on complete TV commercialsdata from 2011 obtained from a research agency which provides a comprehensive media monitoring for the whole advertising market in the Czech Republic. To quantify the similarity (or dissimilarity) among TV channels, the cosine similarity measurement was performed. The results indicate there are only small differences ina TV commercial industry structure between TV channels and audience targeting is implemented only by a very few thematic channels.