Perception of the Effectiveness of Information Content in Newspaper Advertising in Promoting Government’s New Policy: Goods and Services Tax (GST)

In Information Management (IM) field, one of the important and critical part is dissemination of information. It is also an important phase in Information Life Cycle Management. This phase is where information is actively being shared among information users. In other field such as advertising, it is called communication. In both fields, information management and advertising, information content is crucial in determining its effectiveness. In the new information society, the 20th century, information is the essential valuable commodity used almost in every industry to create a better economy using available technology and tool. Using advertising as a tool to disseminate information and newspaper as a channel to disseminate information, it will look at the factors influencing the effectiveness of advertising and information content of advertising is the focus in this study. As our country is headed towards becoming a high income nation with several initiatives through transformation plan, Government Transformation Program (GTP), informing the public is important to embrace the challenge of global economy change. The focuses are postgraduate students of research universities in Malaysia to test their awareness of Goods and Services Tax (GST). In this paper, it will discuss the initial findings on the factors related to the effectiveness through factor analysis and correlation between factors. The findings will assist in providing initial insight on actual factors affecting the effectiveness, thus helping organizations and the government to understand the best practice to enhance effectiveness in organization and government communication and improve part of information governance and information management in an organization which is the dissemination of information. It also provides views on the feasibility of the study.The results from this study show that the there is a potential relationship between effectiveness of information dissemination through advertising, and information content of the medium or channel which is newspaper. A few findings on the current environment regarding the public’s view on advertising information as they regarded advertising and information important and also how they portray Malaysia’s current scenario in advertising information especially in providing relevant information on Goods and Services Tax (GST).The Newspaper as a medium is still significantly relevant to the young people particularly in Malaysia and they read newspaper regularly which brings into the conclusion the relevancy of newspaper advertisement towards the effectiveness of advertising information content. It can be concluded that the public thinks that advertising is an effective and efficient tool to help the dissemination of information and newspaper advertisement is regarded as one of the most source of information alongside the internet and television.