The following is taken from a memo from the advertising director of the Super Screen Movie Production Company.
"According to a recent report from our marketing department, during the past year, fewer people attended Super Screen-produced movies than in any other year. And yet the percentage of positive reviews by movie reviewers about specific Super Screen movies actually increased during the past year. Clearly, the contents of these reviews are not reaching enough of our prospective viewers. Thus, the problem lies not with the quality of our movies but with the public's lack of awareness that movies of good quality are available. Super Screen should therefore allocate a greater share of its budget next year to reaching the public through advertising."
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.
The advertising director has made too many assumptions while recommending for increase in budget for advertising. He has assumed that different reviewers have reviewed the movies, may be only one or two reviewers have done so. May be the movies produced by Super Screen Movie Production Company are only of one genre and the reviewers have a strong predilection for these types of movies, obscuring their true judgement. The reviewers could have been from particular age group who like to view these types of movies.
The others variables could be that there may be some international sports events like world cups or Olympics, which could attract the majority of the public for a significant amount of time. There could be an outbreak of some serious disease like H1NI flu which forced the public to stay at home. As a result of this, most of the people would have watched the movies at their home and that data might not be present in the report.
Additionally, many people might have decided against watching movies in the theatre due to increase in ticket price or may be due to continuous recession. These data might also be not present in the report.
There may be an another reason for fewer people attending the Super Screen Produced movies in the past year, that the movies released in the past year were far more in number as compared to the previous years, thereby influencing the percentage of viewership.
Another flaw in the recommendation is that data for other production companies is not taken into account. May be the movies on the whole were not of such great quality according to the general public, having contradicting views from the movie reviewers. There may be a great number of successful movies form another production company, influencing their opinion about that company and urging people to watch movies produced by that company, resulting in low number of viewers for the other company.
If the advertising director can provide explanations for these variables, then his recommendation should be taken into consideration.
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