Revisiting Reach — The Promise of Cross-Platform Planning

Watching TV the other night, I saw an ad for Brand X. And another. And another and another. After the fourth viewing, I thought “Enough! How many times do I need to see the same ad during the same program?”

Maximizing the audience reached at 1+ frequency—meaning that as many consumers as possible see your ad at least one time—has been gospel truth for many years now. The prevalence of media platforms and the ability to create integrated campaigns present additional challenges to achieving frequency control and unduplicated reach.

But they also bring great opportunity. The best media plan uses each platform to reach a different audience, rather than running the campaign as separate, independent plans for each platform.

Reaching Everyone in Your Intended Audience – the Impossible Dream?

Even in the broad world of TV, I’ve seen over the years that it’s really difficult to reach much more than 80 percent of your intended audience, no matter how much you spend.

A standard media plan typically bombards the heaviest 20 percent of TV viewers with ads, yet directs little or no advertising toward the lightest 20 percent. This isn’t the fault of TV—it’s still the broadest reach media vehicle we have, and virtually all households still watch TV. It’s just that current media planning tools leave something to be desired: more reach.

Light Viewers – Where are They?

So what’s the issue? Well, light viewers tend to be younger, more affluent, better educated and working outside the home—just the type of people who don’t have the time to watch much TV. So they watch more cable, watch programming at different hours, use DVRs, stream content online, etc.

They’re just harder to reach on traditional TV—and current media planning tools don’t do a very good job of constructing plans to reach these people. That’s why TV media plans often end up with approximately 80 percent reach—no matter how much they spend.

Multi-Platform – a Potential Solution?

Focusing on reaching these light viewers online allows you to extend your overall campaign reach against your intended audience. When done strategically, campaigns have achieved nearly 90 percent reach, as measured by Nielsen Campaign Ratings. Without proper insight, however, you may experience high levels of overlap in reach between TV and online, as many heavy TV viewers are also heavy online consumers, leaving you back at square one.

Nielsen Online Audience Segments—TV Viewing provides the insight you need to augment your TV media plan with online ads that reach audiences based on their TV viewing habits, so you can focus on reaching those hard-to-find light TV viewers online.

So instead of a traditional TV plan, which maxes out reach at 80 percent and bombards top quintile viewers with ads, this approach has a broader effect: it extends reach by serving ads to consumers who wouldn’t have otherwise been reached through traditional TV. By more strategically placing ads, it can also cap frequency among the online viewers and reduce frequency among the heaviest TV viewers.

Key Takeaways – Things to Remember

• Maximizing reach at 1+ frequency is the gold standard
• Traditional TV media plans typically don’t achieve more than 80 percent reach
• Heavy viewers are overloaded with ads, while light viewers are exposed to few or none at all
• Extending a campaign across platforms can increase reach and reduce frequency

To me, this looks like a good recipe for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your media plans. Further, it might even benefit your brand by not upsetting heavy viewers in your intended audience who are currently overexposed and probably sick of seeing your ads and brand.

I like more reach per campaign—and at lower cost per thousand (CPM)—especially because I don’t like to be bombarded with the same ad over and over. And I’d be willing to bet that your intended audience would agree with me.

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MediaPost TVBlog Interview — The 3R’s of Advertising Effectiveness

The following is a repost of David Goetzl’s November 27, TVBlog post:

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There’s no sense for advertisers to ever be fully satisfied with the effectiveness of their messaging and tactics. So, they’ll always be in search of more data and the finish line will keep moving.

But here’s at least one enticing landing spot: a gauge of how many consumers saw an ad on one of four screens (TV, PC, tablet, smartphone) and what it prompted them to do (or not) in real time — with the data coming in an easily digestible form, ripe for swift action.

David Goetzl Interview on the 3R’s of Ad Effectiveness

Randall Beard says Nielsen’s on that path with its “3R framework,” an umbrella term for its efforts to measure how reach and resonance lead to reaction. (It could be called 4Rs with an equation where reach + resonance + reaction = revenue.)

Helping in the kitchen are the 3Vs of Big Data, where there’s more volume and variety of information coming at greater velocity.

“There’s way more data, way faster that’s coming at advertisers and agencies,” said Beard, Nielsen’s global head of advertiser solutions. “And one of the big challenges is to have a simplified (platform) that brings it all together in a way that they can easily operationalize it.”

Beard will lead a webinar next week with details on how Nielsen envisions opportunities in a 3R playing field. In advance, he took some time to offer some thoughts:

–In the “reaction” area, the Nielsen Catalina Solutions services look to connect media consumption with purchase behavior. There are multiple research providers looking in that direction with TV advertising. What makes the offering different?

“The audience data is from the Nielsen people meter data set — supplemented by set-top-box data,” he said. “Most of the other players in the space are just simply using set-top-box data … The second thing is that we’re cross-platform, so we have this service not only with TV, but with online, with mobile, with print. So you can identify the most responsive buyer behavior group and then execute that across platforms.”

–If the same ad runs on live TV and online, which is more effective?

The data is not for the exact same ad on both platforms, but 2011 research found the “breakthrough” — percentage of consumers remembering an ad — for 15- and 30-second spots was about 50% higher in an online platform than TV. Hypotheses Beard offered include online platforms offering more of a lean-forward experience and usually a lesser ad load.

–Nielsen, of course, doesn’t determine what the currency is in a particular market. But can any of its “reaction” tools – Nielsen Catalina, Buyer Insights – offer the basis for one should advertisers want to trade on the data?

Beard indicated Nielsen believes it plays more of an advisory role, but there are opportunities for sort of one-off deals.

“We’re trying to bring data to the advertisers, agencies and media companies that they can use to be smarter about the way people plan buy, execute and ultimately optimize the advertising,” he said.

He said working with NBC, Nielsen has found the same ads in its Olympic programming have more “resonance” than when they run elsewhere and NBC has used that to demonstrate effectiveness in a sales process.

–One argument networks make is there is value in ads viewed as they zip by in fast-forward mode via DVRs. Logos might be seen or there may be some reinforcement if a viewer has seen the ad before in full. Has Nielsen developed any insight here through its research?

Not discretely. But it has found that ad recall is 30% lower for time-shifted viewing — whether an ad is skipped or not with a DVR — versus live TV.

“If you know that there’s a difference there, you can certainly assume that at least some part of a lower score in a DVR’d program is because of fast-forwarding,” Beard said. “How much? Couldn’t say.”

– One coveted metric in the “reaction” area would be: did an ad prompt a purchase the next day? (Helpful to consumer package goods and telecom marketers, among others.) Can a viewing-purchase link be available in a sort of overnight fashion a la the cornerstone Nielsen TV ratings?

Not yet. It takes time to connect the dots.

But in a “resonance” sphere – both with TV and digital ads – results come in much faster.

–But clearly the quicker the better – especially if there’s an emphasis on providing real-time insight to allow adjustments.

That’s a “big opportunity,” Beard said, across all platforms. That would give an advertiser with, say, three ads running a chance to determine certain effectiveness gauges for each and do some editing mid-flight.

That not only can improve “resonance,” but save money.

If a 15-second spot is doing just as well as a 30-second one, why stick with it?

“Why spend money on 30s,” Beard said. “Move all your spending to 15s … there’s lots of opportunities for advertisers, in particular, to measure “reach” and “resonance” in as close to real-time as possible and then make smart choices about how they allocate their spending, or improve their advertising  to get a better reaction outcome.”

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Digital Innovation – A Conversation with Group M’s Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman

Last week, the Paley Center for Media hosted their Innovation without Borders conference. I had the pleasure of leading a discussion with the inimitable Rob Norman, the Chief Digital Officer of Group M.

Paley Center for Media Innovation without Borders

In our discussion, Rob and I debated the fragmentation of the media landscape, the increasingly simultaneous consumption of media,  the need for end-to-end advertising measurement, the importance of standard metrics, and the role of real-time optimization, among other things.

Rob Norman — Chief Digital Officer, Group M

To see Rob’s take on these and other media and advertising topics, click here.

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Why Marketers Are Still Struggling with Social Media (and what to do about it)

As the one-time CMO of a large global wealth management business with severe reputational issues during the 2007 financial crisis, I struggled mightily with how to engage with and use social media to help my brand.

Why Marketers Are Struggling with Social Media

Five years later, you’d think things would be better. But almost all of the CMO’s and Marketing leaders I talk with are still struggling with Social. Everyone knows it’s important, they know they need to engage with it, yet they are still trying to answer fundamental questions that are relevant to any Marketing activity:

1)      How do I engage and use social media to benefit my brand and drive sales ?

2)      How do I measure social media and the impact it’s having on my brand—positive or otherwise?

These are challenging questions that almost all Marketers, no matter their sophistication, are struggling with. The question is, why?

Social Media as a Business Driver

In most Marketing activities, Marketers design marketing programs that they believe will increase basic Marketing measures like awareness, trial and consideration, and ultimately result in higher sales.

To do so, Marketers have created predictive tools that increase their confidence that these programs will ultimately work. Examples include:

• Copy testing to predict likely advertising success in building sales
• Purchase intent scores, which measure the likelihood of consumers buying your product
• Market mix modeling norms, which indicate how much sales $1 of investment will yield
• Etc.

A key issue with social marketing programs is that there are few of these measures, and even where they exist, they are highly suspect. Here’s why.

The Impact of Social – An Experiment

In his book “Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer,” Duncan J. Watts describes a web-based experiment designed to emulate a “market” for music, as a means of measuring the impact of social media. He designed the experiment for consumers to listen to, rate, and potentially download songs.

First, he created two groups. Both groups were given the same set of songs to listen to and rate. Each group was further divided into sub-groups so it would be possible to see how multiple groups responded to the same environmental conditions.

But, there was one key difference between the two groups. Group A consumers were not able to see how many of their compatriots were downloading the songs they were listening to. Group B, in contrast, was able to see the downloads and rank order popularity of the music based on other participants behavior. Said differently, group B had a “social layer” of potential influence while Group A did not. The experiment was “repeated” multiple times given that each of the sub-groups had different participants.

Group A results with different participant groups were remarkably consistent–the rank order of songs was similar across groups. If song A was number one in the first group, it was also number 1 in the 2^nd group, 3^rd group, etc.

This tells us not only that consumer music popularity without a “social layer” is consistent and relatively unchanged across groups, but that it is highly predictable.

Group B results were quite different. The most popular songs, and the less popular ones, were typically  even more popular or less popular in Group B than Group A—e.g. the “social layer” of seeing how other participants downloaded songs sharply accentuated the way the degree to which consumers in Group B rated and downloaded songs.

But, equally important, results across different participant groups showed large variations in popularity. So, if song A was most popular in the first group, it might only have middle popularity in the 2^nd group, and so forth.

Social Makes Results More Extreme and Unpredictable

Duncan Watts had this to say about the results:

“In all the ‘social influence’ worlds…popular songs were more popular (and unpopular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, which particular songs turned out to be the most popular—the “hits”—were different in different worlds. Introducing social influence…increased not just inequality but unpredictability as well.”

Said differently, the “social layer” not only caused the ratings to be different, but also made the results much less predictable. This is the challenge that Marketers face with social media:  social interaction and the impact it has on your brand is highly unpredictable.

In a world where CMO’s want to be sure that every dollar they are investing—in time, people and resources—is money that delivers a good return, a fundamental challenge with social is that it’s much less predictable than traditional Marketing programs in how it impacts your brand.

What to Do?  Measure & React

What’s a CMO to do? Well, I believe that real time measurement of social—how well its reaching your consumers, how its changing their attitudes toward your brand (for better or worse), and what impact its having on your sales—is the right way to mitigate and take advantage of the unpredictable nature of social.

Watt addresses unpredictability as follows:

“Rather than predicting how people will behave and attempting to design ways to make consumers respond in a particular way…we can instead measure directly how they respond to a whole range of possibilities, and react accordingly.”

Real time “measure and react” is the best way that you can engage and respond to consumers in a social world when it’s so difficult to predict in advance how social engagement will play out.

That’s why CMO’s need to focus less on creating highly compelling (and perfect) social content and programs, and invest more in quickly understanding how consumers are responding to the various elements of their plan and then adjusting accordingly.

It’s obvious, CMO’s just need to continuously “measure and react,” because when they do so, they already know the answer–and how to respond.

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Does Your Target Audience Really See Your Digital Ads ?

One of the great promises of digital advertising is precision and measurement. With bits and bytes, we should be able to target our brands ads to consumers with a level of precision that could be only dreamed about in the mass TV medium.

But alas, this is also the great fiction of digital. The reality is quite different–at the most basic and fundamental level, digital advertising leaves a lot to be desired–which was a big part of my keynote address “Measuring and Optimizing Reach and Resonance in Digital Advertising,” at the recent Digiday Brand Summit.

Measuring & Optimizing Reach & Resonance in Digital Advertising

Why the fiction?  Two quick points:

1.  Most digital ads are not delivered to the target demographic group.

2.  Many ads are not even “viewable” — e.g. they are not in screen for at least one second.

This is a problem–a big problem. If ads aren’t delivered to the right audience and they’re often not even viewable, how can they have any impact? This is both a big challenge AND a big opportunity for advertisers.

New technology and tools are beginning to address this conundrum. There is strong evidence, supported by actual advertiser experience, to suggest that advertisers can dramatically improve the effectiveness of their digital advertising.

How much? As much as 50% more–simply by taking advantage of new measurement capabilities to ensure that more ads are actually delivered to the correct target audience and are in view of the consumer.

Click here to see my keynote address or here to see the accompanying presentation on how smart Marketers are taking advantage of this large opportunity.

Digiday Brand Summit Keynote Speech – Randall Beard