Role of advertising messages’ placements in Nigerian print media business development: A content analysis of punch newspapers between January 2015 -December 2019

Abstract

This study examined the role of advertising messages’ placements in the business development of Nigerian print media with special focus on Punch Newspapers commercial activities. The research design adopted for the study was Content Analysis using Code sheet as instrument for data collection. The Punch Newspapers was purposively selected while composite week sampling
technique was used to select weekday editions but excluded weekend editions of the selected newspapers. A total of 516 newspaper issues were found, coded and analyzed using inferential statistics. This study was anchored on the Persuasion and Social Responsibility theories. The study found out that advertisement placements are relevant to the commercial growth of the
selected Newspaper organization and that the advertisements that were based on the combination of both messages and images had the highest distribution of 97.9%, this indicated that the combination of these two makes visualization to be more effectively induced than when only one strategy is used. In addition, the study revealed that newspaper advertisements had the highest percent among the content adverts and these enhance print media business development. The study recommended that the print media management as part of their strategy should include new advertising trends influenced by internet capable of improving their online versions of the daily papers in a bid to provide rising advertising income for their budgets. Secondly,
print media management should crave for adverts that are creative in designs, qualities and presentations in order to encourage more patronage. Thirdly, advertisers should strive to improve on their combination of contents and images such that will enhance balance experience attraction. Finally, sprint media owners should encourage advertisers to always bid for full page adverts since it is captivating to audience as well as bettering organization profits. The implication of this study is to expose print media organizations to the effectiveness of advertisements’ placements as life blood for business development and sustainability.