What is the definition of a TV audience impact?

An impacts is:

1. One person
2. Seeing one ad
3. At one time

Example:

If 5 million people watch an ad in the centre break of a TV programme on Thursday evening at 7.30 pm that is 5m impacts.

If the exactly same 5m people watch another ad at 8pm, that is another 5m impacts.

Across the two ads, 10m impacts have been delivered for the client – but remember, it doesn’t mean 10m new people saw the break. In this example, 5m people saw the ad twice.

Are there different types of impact?

Yes, impacts can be counted by different demographic groups. So an ad might deliver:

• 5m Adult impacts
• 2m ABC1 Adult impacts (i.e. 2m of the 5m Adults were ABC1 Adults)
• 1m ABC1 55+ Adult impacts (1m of the 5m Adults were ABC1 Adults who were aged 55+)

Why are impacts important?

TV is traded on cost per thousand audience rates. So if you have a budget of £500k and you are buying CPT (Adults) is £5, then the number of impacts you will be able to buy (using a 30 second ad) will be

(£500,000 / 5) x 1000 = 100 million impacts

We multiply by 1,000 because your TV buying rate is a cost per thousand impacts.

You can learn how impacts are measured as TVRs here

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To illustrate some of the key differences here is a paid media summary in the context of TV:

Objectives:

• Brand advertising tends to seek a change in attitudes towards a brand and deliver uplifts in “lower funnel” sales channels such a display, search and social media
• Direct response advertising tends to seek an immediate behavioural response – the generation of immediate clicks, leads, sales or donations.

Creative strategy:

• Brand advertising tends to position products and services relative to each other in their category and differentiate them using emotional involvement and engagement.
• Direct response tends to persuade consumers to buy immediately using rational messaging.

Here’s a brand advertising TV creative example: Brand advertising building emotional connections – Moneysupermarket

You can see how the essence of the Moneysupermarket ad is entertainment – it uses striking imagery to make an impression on you, build an emotional connection and increase brand trust. The aim is to increase your emotional preference for the brand and reduce your reliance on the functional benefits of the product. That way, when it comes to conversion you will opt to buy from a brand you’ve heard of, feel connected to and trust – even if the pricing or functional benefits are not necessarily the best in the market. In the case of Moneysupemarket, the “do you feel epic?” line invites consumers to be part of a movement.

Here’s a direct response TV (DRTV) advertising example: Direct response advertising is looking for an immediate behavioural response – clicks, quotes, calls, leads or sales

Here you can see how DRTV aims to deliver short-term behavioural change – i.e. web visit response – by covering a lot of selling points in a very short period of time. There is no attempt to gain an emotional connection through entertainment. Quite the opposite – here the intention is to persuade consumers using rational argument.

Ad Timelengths:

• Brand advertising can work on lower timelength edits – typically these are 30 seconds or less – 20s or 10s.
• Direct response advertising tends to require longer timelengths to allow the persuasive arguments to be built and the call to action delivered.

Media Frequency:

• Brand advertising requires both reach and controlled repetition to drive memory. Typically this might be 80% reach at 5-8 OTS  –  that requires between 400 and 640 TVRs.
• Direct response advertising aims to maximise reach at lower levels of frequency so TVR weights can be mush lighter. Given that in the UK, 10 adult TVRs equates to 5m impacts, this weight is adequate to test the responsiveness of an ad.

Media Dayparts and Programme Type:

• Brand advertising requires access to working target audiences which means advertising when they are available to view –  typically this is when they get home from work post 5.30pm – otherwise known as peak. Tends to require high quality programme content environments to maximise chances of engagement with advertising.
• Direct response advertising tends to work best in low interest programme environments and in dayparts where airtime is less demanded and therefore less expensive  – this tends to push DRTV advertising into off peak airtime.

Media Weight:

• Brand advertising tends to require heavier campaign weights. This is because of the requirement to build reach and frequency. There is also strong evidence that share of voice can correlate positively with share of market outcomes
• Direct response aims to maximise reach on the basis that consumers who do not respond on the first or second exposure are unlikely to respond to subsequent exposures in the short-term.

Campaign Evaluation:

• Brand evaluation is based on its objectives – typically these are awareness and consideration shifts and uplift effects on other media channels such as display, search and social.
• Direct response advertising tends to be evaluated based upon immediate response metrics,. clicks, calls, leads, sales, subscriptions and donations
• You can read more about evaluation here

The post How is brand advertising different to direct response advertising? first appeared on Marketing IQ.

1. TVRs (or GRPs, or TRPs) – TVRs or TV rating points are a way of sizing target audiences across both demographics and geography. 1 TVR is 1% of a target audience universe as defined by both demographic and geography. So, if there are 50m adults in the UK then 1 Adult National TVR is 1% of 50m – 500,000. If a national programme is watched by 2m adults it delivers 4 TVRs. TVRs are also a planning currency that allow us to calculate the reach and frequency of media campaigns.
2. Reach (or coverage) – Reach is the percentage of your target audience that is reached by a spot or a campaign.  TVRs build reach and frequency.  This is explained in more detail here.
3. Average opportunities to see (OTS) – Average OTS is the number of times on average that a member of your target audience will see your ad.

There are some simple calculations to illustrate how these numbers work together.  There is one thing you will need to begin this process and that is a reach curve. A reach curve looks like this:

This curve describes the relationship between TVRs and reach. It  illustrates how your reach (sometimes called coverage) increases as you add more TVRs to your campaign.  You will see that with each additional 100 TVRs you add to your campaign, your reach increases more slowly. In practical terms this is because some of your target audience will see your ad more than once, even in the early stages of the campaign. This is called opportunities to see or OTS.

How do  we calculate OTS?

OTS is calculated by dividing your TVRs by your reach: At 300 TVRs we have about 70% reach. That means the average OTS is 300 / 70 = 4.2.

How many TVRs do you need?

To calculate this you need to multiply your target reach by your required OTS. So if you wanted 70% reach at 4 OTS your calculation would be 70 x 4 = 280 TVRs. If you wanted 70% reach at 5 OTS you’d need 350 TVRs. If you wanted 85% reach at 7 OTS you’d need almost 600 TVRs.

Can we calculate reach from TVRs and OTS?

Yes, but only to a point. Reach = TVRs /  OTS. So if you are planning 50 TVRs at 1.5 OTS it would seem that your reach would be 30%. However, reach is not easily predictable. This is for two reasons:

1. First with you will see that whilst the growth in TVRs is linear, the growth in reach is non-linear i.e. it decreases as you add on every 100 TVRs. Between 0 and 100 TVRs we generate 50% reach. But when we add on the next 100 TVRs we only generate 65% reach at 200 TVRs.
2. Different types of campaign on different stations, phased in different ways, with different use of daily schedules (dayparting) will increase reach in different ways. For example, a campaign that runs in weekday daytime between 9am and 5pm may struggle to get over 50% reach even at more than 300 TVRs. This is because you will not be reaching the audience that is working during the day.

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

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This hierarchical path is sometimes called the sales funnel. Funnel metrics allow marketers to measure and control brand awareness, consideration and preference. These metrics allow marketers to say things like “We have 75% awareness and of those 35% would consider purchasing from us and 75% of the consider group place our brand in their preferred set.” Most marketers spend most of their time working to raise brand awareness, consideration and preference. Let’s explore brand awareness, consideration and preference one by one:

Brand awareness

Awareness is the number of people or percentage of a group that are aware of a brand. Awareness is measured in two ways, either as prompted or unprompted (spontaneous) awareness. Prompted awareness is measured by asking people if they are aware of the mentioned brand. It could be the brand name itself, a logo or the brand as part of a list of other brands. Unprompted or spontaneous awareness questions do not mention a brand name but asks consumers to name brands they are aware of in a given category. Examples would be “could you tell name ten airlines that you are aware of” or “can you name five soft drinks brands”.

Brand consideration

Consumers do not purchase all brands they are aware of. They purchase some but may actively avoid others. So, consideration examines whether consumers would consider purchasing a brand they are aware of.  Those who would consider purchasing a brand are measured as a subset of those aware of a brand. Here we see the hierarchical nature of the funnel in action; it is not possible to consider a brand you are not aware of. Consideration questions might ask “of the ten airline brands you are aware of, which would you consider using?”

Brand preference

Consumers tend to have a “preferred set” of brands – these are the set of brands within a category that they prefer to use. Going back to our hierarchical model, the preferred set can only come from within the considered set. Getting into the preferred set is the Holy Grail for many marketers but it’s not easy. Finding a place in the preferred set requires a contribution from all elements of the marketing process. A place in the preferred set is the result of many factors that can drive brand preference; a strong product developed through strong NPD, a product made available through good distribution,  a product pitched at the right price and a product back by good service.  You can see why advertising in itself cannot guarantee brand preference, but advertising can communicate a brand’s attributes which in turn can help to secure preference. Brand preference is measured by asking consumers which brands they prefer to purchase and use within a particular category.

How are these metrics measured?

Brand awareness, consideration and preference are attitudinal and exist within consumers’ minds. The only way they can be measured is through surveys which ask consumers about their relationship with brands.  These surveys can be collected though online panels, face to face or via phone research.

Proxy measures can also be used to build understating but theses are not a substitute for brand awareness research. Digital proxies include search traffic metrics which can be correlated to awareness and consideration. The important point with digital metrics is that they are behavioural, not attitudinal; they tell you that something is happening, but don’t explain why.

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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.

The post How do TVRs build media reach and frequency? first appeared on Marketing IQ.

Unfortunately, many marketing and media channels are planned, negotiated, delivered and evaluated in silos. This means it can be difficult to get a set of comparative response rates which allow you to forecast how well any one channel may work for your business or brand. If you can’t compere them side by side it’s difficult to optimise budget distribution – particularly for customer acquisition activity.

Guide to response rates by media communication channels

With over twenty years’ experience of planning, managing and evaluating campaigns across practically all mainstream media channels, I thought it would be useful to share the metrics that I use as standard response metrics. These are given as percentage response rates of the audience seeing the ad.

Note: These are the response rates I would expect to see based on my experience. They should be used  as a guide and are not a guarantee. They are subject to the caveats listed below.

The caveats

1. Response rates are driven by a number of factors including the product, offer, the creative treatment and the audience selection (media). Ideally, you should work to the highest possible standard in each of these four areas. Compromise on any of these factors will reduce response rates.
2. Most channels have sub-sets of response rates depending on how the channel is being used. For example, TV ads can be “brand awareness” ads, “brand response” ads or “direct response ads”. Each of these have different levels of responsiveness. Brand awareness ads which are designed to change attitudes rather than short term behaviour will not deliver a high response rate.
3. You must factor in the cost of media on a per audience basis. A favourite mistake of response rate observers is to look at response rates without factoring in channel costs. Here’s an example; the response rate from DRTV is about 100 times lower than the response rate from DM, but remember, DM costs around 100 times more per person than TV. In reality, both channels may produce a similar cost per response. That’s why it’s important to look at both factors when analysing and forecasting responses.
4. Response rates aren’t everything; what generates revenue is sales so you need to factor in a conversion rate from response to sale.  As a general rule, personal channels like DM tend to convert at a higher rate than broadcast or online display. You can have a channel with a low response rate and high conversion rate performing as well in cost per sale terms as a channel with a high response rate and a low conversion rate.
5. Marketing activity is subject to diminishing returns; response rates will fall as budgets increase.

For more information on our High Performance Media Planning course please follow this link

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Set 1 – DRTV Phone Response Rates (high to low range as a percentage of total impacts)

• DRTV Type 1 – Hard Hitters – these DRTV hard hitters, with no-nonsense creative, usually on a 60 second time length can achieve between 1% and 0.05%. But please note, exceeding 0.05% is very rare in DRTV. It’s usually delivered through a combination of an extremely powerful ad, a very strong product, a great offer transmitted on a low level but highly responsive audience. It is very difficult to exceed 0.05% at scale.
• DRTV Type 2 – Lead Generators – these DRTV ads are usually seeking subscription trials, leads, quotes etc and run on time lengths between 30 seconds and 60 seconds.  Response rates tend to be around 0.05% and 0.005%.
• DRTV Type 3 – Brand Response – these ‘BRTV’ soft sellers produce lower responses generally in the range of 0.005% to 0.0005%

Set 2 – DRTV Web Response Rates (high-low range as a percentage of total impacts)

• DRTV Type 1 – Hard Hitters –  these are high response rate ads will generate 2-3 times their phone response equivalents so around  2% and 0.1%
• DRTV Type 2 – Lead Generators – web response rates to these tend to generate around 0.5% and 0.05%.
• DRTV Type 3 – Brand Response – these BRTV ‘soft sellers’ produce lower responses generally in the range of 0.05% to 0.005%

Find our more information about our DRTV Media Planning, Buying and Evaluation course please follow this link

The post DRTV Response Rates first appeared on Marketing IQ.

1. Remember all DRTV begins with the offer. Whilst issues around DRTV performance are often seen as “creative” or “media” we need to remember that the proposition to consumers is key to DRTV success. If you are offering free Ferraris you will not need to think in terms of creative or media optimisation. The offer will work. Equally, if you are offering a poorly differentiated product or service, you will find it difficult to sell. Your problems will be exacerbated further if you are in a mature market packed with established offers.  So ask yourself the “so-what” question against every line of copy. If you wouldn’t buy it, no-one else will.
2. Develop compelling DRTV creative. DRTV seeks behavioural change, and consumers need to be given good reasons to stop what they’re doing and do something else. You need to talk in terms of meaningful benefits. There are certain category rules that are helpful. If you’re selling a financial product don’t use jokes. For most people, talking about their hard-earned money is not a funny business. Concentrate on explaining why the product is different, what it offers that is new and why your target audience should find out more.
3. Be careful with emotional sales messages. Most mainstream advertising seeks to build emotional connections between people and brands. For many brands this is the right approach, but if you want to sell off the screen, stick to promoting the benefits that make you different and giving good reasons to buy.
4. Make sure the creative identifies your target audience. Everyone watches broadcast media. The trick to making DRTV work is to create a sense of identification between you and your target audience. Show people and situations that your target audience will identify with. Create the impression that your target audience belongs in the ad.
5. Understand the economics of broadcast media. TV companies use every possible device to maximise the financial yield on the audience they are selling. Yield is the revenue generated by advertising over the cost of attracting that audience i.e. producing or buying the programming.  High quality peak programming is expensive to produce or buy. More people are at home available to view during peak viewing times (5pm to 11pm) so audiences are higher. So TV companies put their highest cost, highest quality programming into the times of day when most people are available to view.  Moreover, ad agencies want high reach, so there is high demand for high quality, high audience programming. All this makes peak airtime expensive both in terms of unit cost and capital cost. The premiums embedded in peak mean it sells at rates that rarely work for DRTV advertisers. But off-peak airtime is an entirely different matter….
6. Unlock the benefits of off-peak airtime. Everybody watches off-peak TV; young, middle-age, old, affluent, less well off, single, married, students, working people and those who’re retired. People take holidays and have days off. But most importantly, the homemaker watches daytime TV and the homemaker is often the person who researches and makes financial plans.  Daytime can be ideal for reaching family decision makers. Daytime can be ideal for reaching students and it can be ideal for reaching affluent grey markets. Off-peak is the place to test your product in DRTV.
7. Test. When you construct a test think about the questions you want to answer. You could test creative A versus creative B.  You could test phone versus SMS or web response. You could test a longer ad versus a shorter ad. And of course you need to test channels and stations. You can construct your test in time blocks – Station 1 with creative A in week 1, station 1 with creative B in week 2,  station 2 with creative A in week 3 and station 2 with creative B in week 4. This way you can analyse the incremental response in each week an look at its cost and conversion characteristics. When you have analysed your results you can “roll out” into the optimal mix of creative and media options.
8. Measure and learn. DRTV is direct response marketing and the lifeblood of direct response is quantified planning and control. Using BARB data it is possible to match minute by minute audience data with your minute by minute click traffic. This allows advertisers to build a response database which matches TV audience with web response. Each spot can be defined by a number of planning variables that can be controlled: day of week, time of day, channel, proximity to previous spot, length of spot and creative execution. All these factors can be combined and used to optimise future DRTV media buys.

Find our more information about our DRTV Media Planning, Buying and Evaluation course please follow this link

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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

The post What is a TVR? first appeared on Marketing IQ.

1. In 2010, Pepsi undertook a massive social media initiative called The Refresh Project which was designed to give $20m to good causes. According to Bob Hoffman, the AdContrarian, it delivered over 80 million votes, almost 3.5 million Facebook likes and nearly 60,000 Twitter followers. But there was just one big problem; it didn’t drive sales – despite the funding coming from Pepsi marketing budgets. Pepsi’s sales fell in the year the project ran and the brand lost 5% market share worth about $350m. To make matters worse, if that were possible, Pepsi slipped to third in brand share behind Coke and Diet Coke.
2. In both 2012 and 2013 IBM used data from around 800 e-commerce sites to track social media’s contribution to sales. In 2012 it arrived at a figure of 0.34%. In 2013 it didn’t publish the number, but hinted that it was even less.
3. In September 2012, one of the world’s leading digital research companies, Forrester Research reported that “Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers. While the hype around social networks as a driver of influence in ecommerce continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of sales…”
4. In March 2013, Mark Ritson, formerly a professor at London Business School observed in Marketing Week that “….marketers are finally beginning to apply some measures to assess the ROI of their [social media] efforts. Once they do that they can do the one thing the social media mavens have counselled against: compare the value of social media with other options, apples to apples. And, in many cases, they are discovering the hullaballoo drummed up by the marketing media and various industry events is not quite all it was cracked up to be.”

I think most people in social media are well aware of this “no sales” problem. And because social media can’t deliver sales, they’ve invented a snow-storm of flaky measures designed to obscure harsh commercial realities. These measures include: ‘likes’, ‘fans’, ‘followers’, ‘shares’, ‘retweets’, ‘pins’, ‘follows’, ‘friends’, ‘influence’, ‘amplification’, ‘forwards’, ‘mentions’, ‘tags’ and ‘reactions’. In a commercial context these are nothing more than diversionary measures. They might enable some positive looking PowerPoint charts but they don’t deliver positive looking sales. These are ROI potatoes, when everyone else is comparing apples.

Amazingly, when social media campaigns fail to deliver sales, social media experts almost always suggest that it was the company management who got it wrong rather admitting to any shortcoming of social media itself. Whilst this claim blames marketers and management, it also spawns a convenient stay of execution for social media’s “gurus”; failure brings an opportunity to “learn lessons”, to “revise approaches” and to “develop new strategies”. In other words social media failure provides a new opportunity for marketers to waste even more money on social media activity.

Marketers badly need a serious reality check on social media. Social media environments aren’t much more than an online version of a public waiting room. People drop in, take a seat, look around and leave. They may leave a bit of rubbish. They may take a bit of rubbish with them. But that, I’m afraid, is pretty much the long and short of it for most brands. Don’t spend too much time in there, nothing will come of it.

If this sounds old-fashioned, I make no apologies. Advertising exists to drive sales.  To have advertising that doesn’t drive sales is like going to a dentist who doesn’t look at your teeth, or a barber who doesn’t cut your hair, or a mechanic who won’t fix your car. If what you’re doing can’t be directly or indirectly linked to generating sales, you’re wasting precious budget.

The post Does social media drive sales? first appeared on Marketing IQ.