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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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

How to Make Digital Advertising Work Harder for Your Brand

As the world moves inexorably digital, Marketers increasingly want to understand how to improve the effectiveness of their digital ad spending.

Digital Metrics and Ad Effectiveness

In many ways, the digital revolution has been its own worst enemy—at least for brand advertisers. Supposed great advances beyond TV metrics like the focus on direct click-thru rates and other digital specific measures were anything but.  I would argue that they’ve sometimes slowed the move of ad spending to the digital medium.

Buying Behavior is Predictive of Advertising Responsiveness

Let’s take click thru rates. For example, it’s now been well documented that for CPG brands click thru rates do not correlate with off-line sales. So, why do so many marketers still talk about click-thru?

Digital Advertising Objectives – Building Brands and Increasing Sales

What do brand advertisers want ? They want to build their brand and improve their sales and advertising ROI. How do they do this in the digital world ?

One new advance is the use of buyer behavior based targeting. New research shows that CPG advertisers can generate about a +20% improvement in average sales lift when their on-line advertising is delivered to consumers using purchase based information to better identify the most responsive consumers.

Now CPG brand marketers know two things with certainty:

1. Brand focused on-line advertising drives off-line sales.
2. Buyer behavior based media buys generate even stronger Sales lifts.

Purchaser Based Data – What is it ?

So, what is “purchaser based data”? Simply put, it’s using consumers past purchase behavior to identify consumer groups which are most responsive to your ads, and then targeting future advertising against these kinds of consumers.

For example, the CMO of Brand X discovered that heavy category users who were light buyers of her brand were much more responsive to Brand X advertising: they accounted for only 20% of the impressions delivered, but 80% of the sales lift due to the advertising.

Other buyer groups received 50% of the impressions, but accounted for almost no sales lift—e.g. Brand X’s spending on ad impressions against this group was a complete waste.

The central insight was this:  Brand X’s media plan was comprised of many TV shows and web sites that were under represented by these highly responsive heavy category/light brand buyer consumers. In addition, there were many TV programs and sites that were over represented with these highly responsive consumers that were nowhere to be found in the brand’s media plan. Read this as ” big opportunity.”

Brand X’s CMO worked with her agency to plan and buy against programs and sites that had heavy concentrations of the heavy category/light brand buyer target—and generated a much higher sales lift by spending against those consumers who are most responsive to the advertising. Buyer behavior based targeting works– just like that.

Additional Buyer Behavior Based Targeting Learnings

So, what else have we learned about buyer behavior based targeting in the on-line space?

• Sales lift differs by category – OTC and health and beauty categories are even more responsive to buyer behavior based targeting than other categories.
• New products get an even larger sales lift – new products averaged about +30% sales lift using buyer behavior based targeting, vs. about +20% for existing products.
• Both small and large brands benefit from buyer behavior based targeting – this is especially good news for small brands which often find TV unaffordable.

With $1 of every $10 ad dollars now being spent on-line, and expectations of even more in the future, CMO’s can get a lot smarter about how they spend their on-line dollars by using buyer behavior based targeting.

So, if you’re a brand based advertiser, throw out the clicks and bring on the buyer behavior based model. After all, it’s only about 20% better. Go tell that to your CFO.

 

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