media planning - Marketing IQ

Why we must learn to build brands in digital media

Simon Foster — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 08:44:47 +0000

In this article, written for the mSix’s website, I highlight how digital media has passed the tipping point and why marketers must evolve beyond the simplistic ‘long and short duopoly’ and use digital media to build brand fame as well as driving performance.

The time is right to challenge and develop the original works of Binet and Field. ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’ [1] and ‘The Long and the Short of It’ [2] are now more than a decade old. This work reflected the mesia landscape as it as then and put TV at the heart of brand building, but since then the media consumption landscape has changed – and it has changed dramatically.

In 2013, and taking the US as an example, TV, radio, and print dominated with 53% of media consumption minutes. Within this, TV delivered 4:30 minutes per day (38%). At the same time, digital channels accounted for the 4:50 mins (40%). But by 2022, US TV, radio, and print consumption had fallen to 34% and US mobile and desktop had grown to around 62% of consumption (although total media consumption minutes have increased by around 15%, likely due to mobile ubiquity) [3]. Most significantly, US mobile consumption has almost doubled from around two hours per day to over four. Patterns for the UK are broadly similar, with 2:26 mins on TV in 2012 failing to 1:42 in 2022 and 24:00 mins per day in Social growing to 1:17 mins by 2022 [4].

Against these tectonic shifts, Binet and Field’s 2013 argument that TV is the prerequisite brand-building channel must be challenged and, as a consequence, we need to ask, how do we build brands in digital media?

Traditionally, TV has been the place where ‘System 1’ messaging has been delivered through emotional connections, fame and reach. System 1 messaging is a core ingredient of fame building. This type of communication aims for high mental availability and fast effortless decision making through ubiquity – which is essentially, fame. At the core of this thinking is reach – reaching as many of your potential audience as possible. Put in a slightly different way by the late Jeremy Bullmore, “if you want to be as famous as BMW, it’s no use being known only by the tiny percentage of the population who can afford to buy your car today”.

Until recently, digital channels have been used primarily to target these “tiny percentages” with System 2 “buy now” messaging. But this approach severely undervalues the reach potential of digital channels. According to IPA Touchpoints the post lockdown high reach digital media channels are social media and functional internet (commercially funded websites which are not for media, social media or communication e.g. search, shopping, researching). These channels can deliver 70% to 80% weekly all-adult reach, putting them on a par with commercial TV and way ahead of commercial radio, magazines, newsbrands and cinema.

Of course all this means moving your guardrail KPIs from performance to brand metrics like attitudinal shifts, recall, preference, purchase intent, and incremental brand growth. Measurement and monitoring techniques need to shift uplift experiments, MMM and tracking studies.

The shifts in focus that are required to build brands in digital are summarised in the checklist below:

Targeting: Move from tight signals targeting to brand audience reach
Mental message processing: Move from System 2 (aim to close the sale) to System 1 (aim to change instincts)
Messaging: Move from rational to emotional engagement
Mental availability: Move from Low to High
Optimisation: Move from short term CPA to longer term attitudinal metrics like consideration and purchase intent
Evaluation metrics: Move from performance metrics to a set of agreed attitudinal metrics
Evaluation cadence: Move from short term to medium term

By changing the way we plan, activate, measure and benchmark digital channels we unlock their ever-expanding potential to build and reinforce brand attributes and, in doing so, prove it’s now time to move beyond the long and short of it.

References

Binet and Field, ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’ IPA 2007
Binet and Field, ‘The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies’, IPA 2013
‘Average time spend with media in the US’, eMarketer April 2016 and April 2022
IPA Touchpoints 2023
IPA ‘Making Sense: the Commercial Media Landscape’ 2022

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What is the craft of media planning?

Simon Foster — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 09:32:14 +0000

Over the last year people have been increasingly talking about the “craft” of media planning. Back in February 2019, Gideon Spanier the media editor of Campaign wrote, “the craft of media planing needs to make a comeback” and he further opined that “media planning has declined in importance in recent years – with serious consequences”. More recently, Steve Gladdis, CSO at Mediacom has argued that the “craft [of media planning] will become more important as a driver of growth”.

So why are we talking about media planning again, what does it really mean and why is it set to become more important?

The media landscape has changed almost beyond recognition in the last fifteen years. Since Google became mainstream around 2005, we have seen huge growth in digital media consumption and corresponding growth in digital media budgets. Because of its high measurability and its proximity to the purchase, there has been increased focus on using digital media to convert consumer demand into purchases.

But there is a critical distinction to be made between channels that convert demand and channels that create and grow demand. Whilst lower funnel channels convert pre-existing demand, mid and upper funnel channels deliver the brand preference that is essential to create and grow brand demand.

Many of the world’s biggest digital businesses recognise the ability of traditional media to deliver growth at scale; Amazon, Booking.com, eBay, Facebook, Google, HomeAway, Hotels.com and Microsoft are all huge users of traditional media and especially TV.

LinkedIn Case Study

A good example of a pure play digital brand using traditional media to grow is the recent campaign activity from LinkedIn.

Across 2019 it has continued to invest in offline media at scale – utilising print media – especially newspapers and outdoor.

Example LinkedIn tube ad October 2019

So why, given the perfect target audience reach of LinkedIn, and its own heavily used subscriber platform why would it wish to communicate in traditional media?

There are four key reasons for this:

First, consumers still spend a lot of time in environments where offline media will reach and influence them. They spend almost 3 hours per day watching TV. The reach of outdoor advertising remains undiminished, and the gradually declining medium of press still reaches over 11m adults every day in the U.K. (Newsbrands 2019). This ability deliver high scale reach, physical presence and mental availability is vitally important to the health of brands (see Sharp, How Brands Grow).

Second, these channels deliver strong visual or aural impact; it’s difficult to ignore or “Adblock” TV, press, radio or outdoor. This cut-through presence helps marketers communicate key aspects of brand personality quickly and effectively and drives memory building in consumers’ minds.

Thirdly, communicating in paid channels confers brand status, authenticity and trust – increasingly important characteristics in the current low-trust media environment of fraud and fake news.

And last but not least, traditional media is low cost on a CPM basis – TV, print, outdoor and radio all have CPMs that are typically below the CPMs you might see in search engines.

These four points are some of the reasons why the world’s largest digital superbrands still pile billions of pounds or dollars into traditional media channels.

So what is the craft of media planning?

The most effective campaigns combine both mass, segment and individual communications across both digital performance and high reach traditional media. But making investments across these multiple channels requires deep levels of audience insight combined with high levels of media knowledge plus experience in planning and evaluating all media channels and the experience of knowing how to orchestrate the selected channels into a single cohesive plan. And deploying this skillset is what we call media planning.

The craft of media planning is knowing how to use media to grow demand for brands rather than simply harvesting sales from within the current demand pool.

The toolkit required to use media to grow brand demand has the following component parts:

Understanding the business, marketing and campaign objectives of the brand
Understanding how the consumer sees the brand and relate to it, what they like about it and why they buy it.
Understanding the relative position of the brand in the category and how it is different from competitors
Understanding the purchase and usage patterns of the brand
Understanding how the category behaves – from seasonality to competition
Knowing all the different types of data and research that will help build understanding of consumer behaviour and media channel performance
Understanding which audiences, segments, behaviours, regions, towns, cities or postcodes are most likely to yield the target audience being sought.
Having a strong understanding of how all media media channels work, their cost structures and the type of business outcomes they can deliver
Having a strong understanding of the communications task capabilities of each channel – do they build awareness, increase consideration or drive sales conversions?
Having an understanding of how media channels can synergise to identify where different combinations can have a 2+2=5 effect
Understanding how media channels can be used creatively to engage consumers
Knowing how media channels are sold, bought, traded and managed
Be able to identify and define the type of campaign that is likely to deliver the marketing and campaign objectives most effectively and efficiently
Being able to organise the audience insights and media channel capabilities and costs into a cohesive plan of action which details of what each channel will contribute, how channels will be used, and how they will be measured and controlled.

Is media planning art, science or craft?

Producing an effective media plan is not an art and it’s not a science. But – it has the characteristics of both; good media planning requires logical data analysis and it also requires intuitive and innovative thinking.

The best media planners serve a professional apprenticeship followed up by practical experience – learning through experience – which makes media planning a craft.

So why do we need the craft of media planning more now than ever before?

Fifteen years ago everything looked like it was going to go digital. And it also looked like traditional media was going to decline terminally. But the reality is neither have happened. Yes, digital has grown enormously but it hasn’t moved so far up the marketing funnel as to displace traditional media – if anything digital has hovered around the lower funnel zone. Meanwhile, traditional media has declined but it still completely dominates the upper funnel.

All this means planning consumer and B2B communications has got a whole lot more complicated. Advertisers need specialists who can navigate through this complexity on their behalf, find the opportunities and produce integrated plans to deliver business objectives and commercial outcomes.

In short, the need for high quality media planning has never been greater or more pressing than it is now.

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How to calculate cost per thousand (CPM) in paid media

Simon Foster — Sat, 27 Jul 2019 10:42:12 +0000

Cost per thousand is a key metric in paid media planning. It’s important because it tells you the comparative cost of reaching the same volume of target audience in different media channels. Did you know that the cost of reaching 1,000 people in TV is about £5 and the cost of reaching 1,000 people by direct mail is about £500? Or the cost of reaching people in programmatic display is about £1.50 and in radio it’s about £3?

If you’re a media planner allocating budgets it’s impossible to do this properly without an appreciation and understanding of cost per thousand by media channel.

Calculating this metric is not difficult – you simply divide the cost of an ad by the number of audience it will deliver.

Let’s work through some examples:

A radio station tells you an ad will costs £500 and be heard by 50,000 listeners. Good value or not? Let’s divide £500 by 50 (that’s 50 thousands). Answer £10. The range you’d expect to pay for radio is between £1 and £5 so £10 is very expensive.
A newspaper rep tells you a half page ad will cost £10,000 and run on print run of 1 million. Let’s do the calculation: £10,000 divided by 1,000 (thousands) is £10. In press you could expect to pay between £5 and £15 for a half page so a £10 CPM isn’t bad.
A DM data owner tells you it will cost £20,000 to buy a list of 10,000 names. The CPM is £2,000. That’s extremely expensive. Even the very highest quality premium DM lists rarely cost more than £500 CPM.

Accounting for the size of format of your ad

Some ad are bigger than others, in radio and TV some are longer than others. In digital display some are static images, some are animated and some are video. The size and format of an ad can have an impact on the CPM. Let’s look at a press example:

A newspaper sells 500,000 copies a day. A half page ad cost £5,000 and a quarter page ad costs £3,000. The CPM on the half page is £10 whilst the CPM on the quarter page is £6. By using a quarter page you are reducing your CPM from £10 to £6. Across a large campaign that’s a big cost saving.

How CPM affects reach

Assuming you have a fixed budget of £200,000, you will reach 20m people with a half page campaign (£200,000/10*1000), but you’ll be able to reach more than 33m with a quarter page campaign (£200,000/6*1000).

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How to calculate TV impacts from your media budget

Simon Foster — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 08:44:57 +0000

Calculating TV impacts from your media budget is relatively easy.

The formula is: Budget / CPT x 1,000

So, if your budget is £250,000 and your CPT is £5 then you are buying 50,000 thousands of impacts or 50,000,000 impacts.

In TV media planning these calculations are usually based on a 30 second ad. But what happens if you are running a different time length?

TV time-length factors

When you are running different time lengths you have to weight the budget to account for the fact that you are buying more or less time in the ad break. You then use this weighted budget to calculate your impacts. The weighting factors are as follows:

60 seconds = divide your budget by 2 (as you are buying twice the length of a 30 second ad.
40 seconds = divide by 1.33
30 seconds = divide by 1
20 seconds = divide by 0.85
10 seconds = divide by 0.5

This means that if you are running a 60 second ad your £250k budget has to be considered a £125k budget for the purpose of calculating your media impacts. Likewise if you are planning for a 10 second ad, your budget is worth £500k for the purpose of calculating impacts.

Understanding time-length cost efficiencies

You should notice that in the factors above the weightings do not always match the relationship to 30 seconds. For example, 10 seconds is only 33% of 30 seconds but the time length factor charged by TV contractors is 0.5. This means you are paying a 50% cost weighting premium to run a 10 second ad vs a 30’second ad.

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How do TVRs build media reach and frequency?

Simon Foster — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 18:47:34 +0000

As we saw in the “what is a TVR” post a TVR is a percentage of a given target audience in a given geographic base. But is a TVR any more than that? Well, yes it is. A TVR is an important factor in calculating how media activity builds reach and frequency. Reach is the percentage of your target audience seeing your ad at least once. Frequency is the number of times they see it.

How TVRs build campaign reach

Let’s assume you buy 100 TVRs in a given region. We know from our last post on TVRs that 100 TVRs is an amount of audience that is the equivalent of 100% of our target audience base. But here’s the first important lesson in how TVRs build reach and frequency. 100 TVRs will not deliver 100% reach of that base. In fact 100 TVRs will probably build around 50-60% reach depending on how those TVRs are distributed in the plan. So what is delivered by the TVRs that don’t deliver reach? Well, they deliver frequency.

How TVRs build campaign frequency

In the early stages of campaign, most people will see the ad only once. But some will see it twice and some may see it three times. Let’s say, for example, that 50% see it once, 20% see it twice and 15% see it three times 10% four times and 5% five times. These percentage total 100 and this is effectively how your 100 TVRs are distributed. This is called frequency distribution.

How to estimate frequency from TVRs and reach

There is a simple formula for estimating how TVRs deliver both reach and frequency. Let’s continue to assume you have 100 TVRs. Frequency (sometimes called average opportunity to see or OTS) is calculated by dividing your campaign reach into your campaign TVRs. So, if you have 100 TVRs and your campaign delivers 50% reach then your average OTS is 100/50 = 2.

How many TVRs does my campaign need to be effective?

This depends upon whether or not you adopt the view that reach is more important than frequency. Modern “recency” planning advocates (John Philip Jones, Erwin Ephron, Byron Sharp) argue that each point of reach will deliver more sales response than additional points of frequency (i.e. the percentage of people seeing the ad twice, three times etc). So they advocate building maximum reach on a weekly or a monthly level, but not building frequency. To achieve this objective media planners will seek between 100 and 150 TVRs per week and often plan the delivery of these TVRs in a week on, week off “drip” pattern. This type of campaign plan tends to suit campaigns that are designed to regularly remind consumers about a product they are already aware of.

More traditional media planning approaches (Krugman for example) suggest a minimum frequency of 5 OTS before a message begins to resonate with a prospect. Our calculation tells us that if we want to achieve 80% reach at 5 OTS we will need 80×5 = 400 TVRs. Targeting an average of 7 OTS would require 560 TVRs. You can see why a launch campaign would typically be around 600 TVRs.

More advanced forms of planning use statistical modelling to estimate the sales response curve to advertising. These models show how budget and TVRs drive sales response (could be retail or online sales) on a weekly basis and forecast when spend levels will hit diminishing returns. For more on this please see these pages

Thanks to Ivan Clark for comments.

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What is a TVR?

Simon Foster — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 15:07:55 +0000

This is a question that many marketers don’t want to ask, especially when they are halfway through the agency’s TV presentation. The trouble is, the agency team have been talking about TVRs for about 20 minutes, the coffee’s gone cold and you daren’t chip in to ask “exactly what is a TVR?”

Put very simply a TVR is a TV Rating point and it means a given percentage of a base population watching a TV programme where that base is defined as 1) a given target audience in 2) a given TV region or area. What’s important here is that because we are talking percentages the bases from which those percentages are taken can change, and this can mean huge differences in the volumes of audience actually seeing an ad. Let’s look at some examples of the effect of different base criteria when establishing TVRs.

If a TV spot runs across the UK TV network and delivers 1 Adult Network TVR how many people will see that spot? The base criteria here are 1 TVR, meaning 1% of a) the UK TV Network and b) the adult demographic population base. If there are 49 million adults in the UK i.e. across the whole UK TV network, then 1 Network Adult TVR is 1% of 49 million. That’s 490,000 Adults.

But we could also have 1 Adult TVR in the London ITV region; these are very different base criteria. If there are 9.5m adults in London then 1 Adult TVR in London would be 1% of 9.5m – that’s 95,000. So we can already see that 1 Adult Network TVR equates to more than 5 times the audience volume of 1 Adult London TVR. Remember 1 TVR against one set of base criteria is not the same as 1 TVR against another set of base crieria. In other words, not all TVRs are equal.

Then we can look at different audiences. The UK media industry breaks audience down from all Adults 16+ into a number of sub-groups refined by age and socio economic group so we might have ABC1 Adults or Men aged 25-44 or ABC1 Women or Women aged 25-54. Each of these sub-groups (sometimes called “demos”) has a different size of population base.

So, for example we might look at a programme that delivers 1 ABC1 Adult Network TVR. As there are 26.7m ABC1 Adults in the UK network area then 1 ABC1 Adult Network TVR equates to 267,000 ABC1 Adults. If there are 5.8m ABC1 Adults in London, the 1 ABC1 Adult London TVR would equate to an audience of 58,000 ABC1 Adults.

We need to remember that when we measure a sub-group, we are only measuring audience in that sub-group. So, whilst a programme may deliver 58,000 ABC1 Adults, it could still deliver 100,000 Adults in total. 100,000 Adult viewers in London would mean the programme had an Adult London TVR of 100,000 / 9.5m – that’s 1.05 Adult London TVRs.

TVRs are important because they are used to populate models which estimate the reach and frequency of an advertising campaign. As TVRs build so do reach and frequency. More on that in later posts…

For information on our TV Planning and Buying training course please follow this link

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