Cable TV: It wasn't so long ago that cable swaggered around the television industry as the upstart threatening the broadcast networks. Now, cable is old news.
The antagonist is the satellite dish with the capability of delivering hundreds of channels and offering an array of movies and sports events. The technology is known as direct broadcast satellite, or DBS. The new challenger has awakened the "sleeping giant" cable industry, which has hit the airwaves with some of the most aggressive advertisements the television industry has seen.
The ads emphasize the downside of disconnecting cable and choosing to purchase a satellite dish. One commercial opened with a man on a couch joined by his wife with a large bowl of popcorn. They snuggled in front of their television set, hooked up to DBS. She seemed excited about their new system and exclaimed, "So this is it?" She then asked how much the satellite dish cost. When her husband answered, the excitement was off. "There's no monthly fee?" she asked. "No more than cable," he responded.
When she asked to watch the news, he sheepishly said, "Uh, can't get local news." At the end of the commercial, the spokesperson for the cable industry declared, "These days when everyone is promising you the future of television, isn't it nice to know you already have it?"
- Refer to Cable TV. The television advertising utilized by cable operators represents the means by which the company communicates to current users to influence an opinion or elicit a response. This is called:
a. distribution.
b. price.
c. research and development.
d. promotion.
e. publicity.
ANSWER: d
- Refer to Cable TV. The cable industry's ad campaigns are designed to communicate to a large audience via television and radio. It uses ___ communication.
a. mass
b. clutter
c. interpersonal
d. intrapersonal
e. public
ANSWER: a
- Refer to Cable TV. The cable industry is the originator of this ad campaign against satellite dishes. The industry represents the ___ in the communication process.
a. communicator
b. encoder
c. sender
d. channeler
e. receiver
ANSWER: c
- Refer to Cable TV. Television represents the ___ in the communication process used by the cable industry to transmit its message.
a. feedback loop
b. channel
c. encoder
d. receiver
e. communicator
ANSWER: b
- Refer to Cable TV. Keisha is watching television and sees an ad for DBS. Two ads later, she sees the new television ad for her local cable system. When questioned an hour later about advertising she has seen most recently, Keisha remembers a "cable" ad but cannot recall the details. Keisha's inability to recall the ad is most likely caused by ___ in the communication process.
a. feedback
b. the use of a channel
c. a shared frame of reference
d. cognitive dissonance
e. noise
ANSWER: e