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

The post What is a TV Audience Impact? first appeared on Marketing IQ.

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.

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.

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.