Advertising media planning

4. General procedures in media planning

Marketing considerations must precede media planning. Media planning never starts with answers to such questions as, “Which medium should I select?” or “Should I use television or magazines?” Planning grows out of a marketing problem that needs to be solved. To start without knowing or understanding the underlying marketing problem is illogical, because media are primarily a tool for implementing the marketing strategy.  This analysis is made so both marketing and media planners can get a bird’s-eye view of how a company has been operating against its competitors in the total market. The analysis serves as a means of learning the details of the problem, where possibilities lie for its solution, and where the company can gain an advantage over its competitors in the marketplace.

After analyzing the marketing situation, marketing and media planners devise a marketing strategy and plan that state marketing objectives and spell out the actions to accomplish those objectives. When the marketing strategy calls for advertising, the usual purpose is to communicate to consumers some information that helps attain a marketing objective. Media are the means whereby advertisements are delivered to the market. Once a marketing plan has been devised, an advertising creative strategy must also be determined. This consists of decisions about what is to be communicated, how it will be executed, and what it is supposed to accomplish. A statement of advertising copy themes and how copy will be used to communicate the selling message is also part of that strategy. Media planning decisions are affected by the advertising creative strategy because some creative strategies are better suited to one medium than to any other. For example, if a product requires demonstration, television is the best medium. If an ad must be shown in high-fidelity color, magazines or newspaper supplements are preferable. Creative strategy also determines the prospect profile in terms of such demographic variables as age, sex, income, or occupation. These prospects now become the targets that the planner will focus on in selecting media vehicles. Modern channel planning software can aid in the process of selecting the best media channels.

Up to this point, persons other than the media planner have been making decisions that will ultimately affect the media plan. The marketing or marketing research people are responsible for the situation analysis and marketing plan, although media planners are sometimes involved at the inception of the marketing plan. Copywriters and art directors are generally responsible for carrying out the creative strategy. Sometimes a marketing plan is as simple as a memorandum from a marketing executive to the media planner or even an idea in an advertising executive’s mind. In such informal situations, media planning begins almost immediately, with little or no marketing research preceding it. Exhibit 1 summarizes the preplanning steps.

 

The media planner begins work as soon as a marketing strategy plan is in hand.

This plan sets the tone and guides the direction that the media decisions will follow. The first item to come out of such a plan is a statement of media objectives. These are the goals that a media planner believes are most important in helping attain marketing objectives. Goals include determination of which targets (persons most likely to purchase a given product or service) are most important, how many of those targets need to be reached, and where advertising should be concentrated at what times.

Objectives form the basis for media strategies. A media strategy is a series of actions selected from several possible alternatives to best achieve the media objectives. Media strategies will cover such decisions as which kinds of media should be used, whether national or spot broadcast advertising should be used, how ads should be scheduled, and many other decisions. After the strategy is determined, the implementation of the media plan begins. Some planners call all these subsequent decisions tactics. Whatever they are called, many decisions still have to be made before tactics culminate in a media plan. These decisions might include the selection of vehicles in which to place ads, the number of ads to be placed in each vehicle, the size of each ad, and the specific position within each vehicle that an ad will occupy.

A media plan is custom tailored—designed expressly to meet the needs of an advertiser at a given time for specific marketing purposes. A media plan should never be a copy of last year’s plan with new costs, nor should it be simply a blank form with spaces that can be filled in quickly with selected dates or times for running ads. Each media plan should be different from preceding ones for the same product. Plans are custom tailored because the marketplace is rarely the same from year to year. Competitors rarely stand still in their marketing activities. They change their messages, change their marketing expenditures, introduce new brands, or discontinue distribution of old brands. Consumers also change, moving to different geographical areas, getting new jobs, retiring, getting married, adopting different leisure-time activities, or buying new kinds of products. As a result, each marketing situation presents new opportunities as well as new problems. Because marketing situations change, new approaches to planning are constantly needed to keep up with or ahead of competitors. Media planning is also affected by the new kinds of research or analysis needed to keep abreast of a changing business world. Media planning requires a great sensitivity to change. For this reason, even direct competitors may decide on very different media strategies. Exhibit 2 shows the allocation of calendar 2008 media dollars by the six leading vacuum cleaner companies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Problems in media planning

 

2. Insufficient Media Data

Media planners almost always require more data about markets and media than are available. Some data never will be available, either because audiences cannot be measured or the data are too expensive to collect. For example, no complete and inclusive research service measures the audience exposure to outdoor advertising, to television viewing in hotel rooms, or to portable television viewing. Why? Because such media are too expensive to adequately measure, given their complexity and the amount of advertising revenue they produce. Both outdoor exposure and out-of-home TV viewing have been measured, but not on a continuous basis in all cities. There is also inadequate research showing the amount of money that competitors spend yearly for outdoor advertising, local cable TV advertising, regional sports TV networks, sponsored search advertising on Google, and many other advertising venues. The Nielsen television rating service measures the audience size only in terms of individuals whose people meter button is pushed or who wrote in a diary that they are watching television. But even if there are people in front of the television set who say they are watching the program, there is no guarantee that they are paying attention to the commercials. Numerous studies have attempted to measure engagement with television programs, but have come up short, beginning with finding an acceptable definition for the term. Joe Plummer, the chief research officer of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), put forth this not entirely satisfactory definition, “Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.” A council of the ARF has been formed to study the question in more detail and issue reports of research findings on the subject.

Another problem in television planning is that decisions about the future performance of television programs must be based on past performance. If the future is radically different from the past, then the data on which a decision is based may be worthless. Although advertising impressions delivered on the Internet are counted with extreme precision, it takes a special effort to know if a banner ad actually appeared on the user’s screen or if the viewer clicked away before it had a chance to come up, especially if the ad appears near the bottom of the page. Even then, it is impossible to know if any attention was paid to the ad. With click-through rates typically well below 1 percent, the impact of a banner ad is likely to be minimal. Greater attention is paid to the highly creative “rich media” that include streaming video, audio, animated cursor, and so on. But there is no data on “how much” more attention will be paid to this particular rich media execution.

The problem of obtaining sufficient information is especially acute for small advertisers, many of whom cannot afford to buy research data. They must rely on published guides, such as Mediaweek’s Marketer’s Guide to Media, that give an indication of costs and audiences, but they are typically a year or more old and lack the detail of a paid research subscription. They also may lack sales and marketing information, even about their own products, if they sell only to distributors or wholesalers. Since an advertiser’s detailed sales information is highly confidential, often from their own agency, media planners typically must estimate the client’s sales position from published sources or simply go without that information in the preparation of their plans.

Measuring how people read newspapers and magazines is another problem. How much of any given magazine or newspaper is read? How many advertisements are read? How thoroughly are they read? What is the value of placing an advertisement in one vehicle versus another? How does each vehicle affect the perception of an advertisement that it carries? What percent of the people who read a Sunday newspaper open up the Parade or USA Weekend Magazine? Answers to these and many other questions are not available on a continuing basis, so the media planner must make decisions without knowing all the pertinent facts.

1. Time pressures

A problem that affects media planning in an entirely different way is that of the time pressure involved in making decisions. This is compounded by the universal availability of e-mail that leads to the expectation of an instant response. Gone are the days when a planner had a few days’ grace from the time it took for a written response to be delivered by the postal system. When the agency and advertiser are ready to start their advertising program, the planner often is faced with a lack of the most recent information needed to solve problems thoroughly. For example, in many cases the planner requires competitive media expenditure analyses showing how much each competitor spends in major markets throughout the country. Although modern systems can deliver the raw data in seconds, the systems for gathering the data from the television networks, magazines, radio stations, and so forth have not changed in decades. Today’s planners must wait six to eight weeks to learn about the competitor’s spending in these media.

Another time-related problem is the limited number of broadcast times and programs available to be purchased by advertisers at any given time. This problem is compounded if the client is slow to approve the budget, in which case the most desirable broadcast time periods and programs might be sold before the advertiser enters the marketplace. In other situations, research data are so plentiful that there are neither personnel nor time to analyze them. This is especially true for the large amounts of computerized data on media audiences and brand usage. Computers are able to produce masses of cross-tabulations at lightning speeds, but often such data go unused because there is insufficient time to analyze them. This is especially true for online media research. Josh Chasin, the research director of comScore, said, “One of the consequences of being the most measurable medium is that the Internet ends up as the medium with the most measures.” The online planner’s challenge is to decide which of the many measures are most useful for selecting websites for an online campaign, or which measures are most relevant for the advertiser’s marketing objectives.

 

2. Institutional Influences on Media Decisions

One of the less obvious external sources of influence on media decisions is the effect of client pressure to use or not use certain media vehicles or to use them in certain ways. Often these pressures are well known by everyone working on a client’s account; the client continually reminds everyone of the restrictions. But  there are times when these influences are known by relatively few persons, perhaps only those who regularly visit the client and are constantly communicating directly with him or her. Other subtle influences also affect planners. Directors or assistant directors in the media department or in account executive positions often influence decisions.

The problem with these institutional influences is that little or no information is available concerning the extent to which they exist or how much they affect decisions. These influences probably vary from client to client.

 

3. Lack of objectivity

One of the continuing problems in media decision making is the sterility of thinking about strategy. Planners are not always objective. For example, an overdependence on numbers can affect objectivity. Media executives often think that when a decision is substantiated by numbers, such as television ratings, the decision must be valid because the numbers prove it so. It is often difficult to argue with decisions proved by numbers, yet the numbers can be misleading. The methods of measurement might be imprecise, the sample size might be too small, or the technique of measurement might be biased or too insensitive to really measure what it is supposed to. Or there might be a set of numbers of major significance that are not available to the media planner—all of which can affect the objectivity of the decision maker. Uncritical acceptance of numbers is a dangerous practice and can lead to decisions that common sense indicates are wrong. Objectivity is also affected when a planner accepts relative data as absolute. For example, the sizes of television audiences reported through ratings are not absolute measurements. When a television rating service shows that 5 million homes tuned in to a given television program, this does not necessarily mean that precisely 5 million homes actually tuned in to the program. It is an estimate that is based on a sample. For this reason, there is a margin of error around the number that varies depending on the size of the sample and the size of the audience being measured— the smaller the sample and the smaller the audience, the larger the margin of error. Planners must be aware that there is no significant difference between two media vehicles that have almost the same audience. Clients are certain to challenge the basis upon which media decisions are made.

 

4. Measuring advertising effectiveness

The effectiveness of direct response online advertising can be measured very accurately with the use of click-through rates and the number of leads generated. But for consumer package goods and the many other products whose advertising objectives go beyond an immediate response, there is no generally accepted way of measuring advertising effectiveness. This makes it difficult to prove the correctness of media decisions beyond the audience information reported in the research sources.

For many years, advertisers have attempted to measure the return on investment (ROI) that they get from their advertising dollars. This seemingly intuitive measure is complicated by the lack of clear definitions. Does it mean sales? Profit? Brand awareness? Trial? How is the return on the advertising investment differentiated from that of the entire marketing plan? The “investment” part of the metric is also ambiguous. Is it just the money spent in media? Or is it the money spent on promotions, coupons, packaging, sales incentives, and all the marketing expenses other than paid advertising?

Consequently, decision making has not advanced to the point where there is always substantive proof that one medium is much better than another. Often a media planner has biased preferences in favor of one media class over others and will favor the medium regardless of what statistics or other objective evidence might indicate. In this writer’s experience, specialty agencies, particularly those dealing exclusively with online planning and buying, tend to be advocates of online media—a frame of mind that differs from generalist media planners who recommend whatever medium best meets the needs of the advertiser. Notwithstanding these problems, decision making is improving and will undoubtedly improve as long as the people in charge realize there are problems and attempt to improve the situation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. The relationship among media, advertising, and consumers.

 

3. How Consumers Choose Media: Entertainment and Information

Most advertising is delivered to consumers by mass media such as newspapers, television, magazines, or radio. Audiences are not, however, waiting for mass media to come to their doors. They have many other activities that compete for their time and interest, such as business, family, church, and leisure. Audiences become interested in certain subjects because a need or want is developed. They choose the television programs they watch and the magazines they read because they expect to see certain subjects that satisfy their interests quickly. For their favorite TV shows, they will set their digital video recorder (DVR) to record or will watch at their leisure from their cable system’s video on demand (VOD) or online from Hulu or another video service. Sometimes they are willing to waste a bit of time watching television programs of little interest while waiting for their favorite programs to come on or leafing through a newspaper or magazine casually as they wait to go on to some other activity, but they probably pay less attention to these intervening media than they do to their favorites. What audiences usually want from media is either entertainment or information. To what extent does any media vehicle provide what audiences want? The degree of intensity among audiences in evaluating media content depends on several variables, including those discussed in this section. This difference in intensity will most likely affect the degree of attention paid to the medium itself or to advertising placed therein.

 

1. Strong Feelings

Many audience members have strong or weak feelings about a medium. They express some of the feelings using adjectives that describe what they like, such as being a leader, authoritative, provocative, warm, cold, strong, or weak. Some media are difficult to describe, suggesting that the relationship between audience members and the media is confusing, negative, or indifferent. When media images are measured, feelings often show up for some media. Media that take political stands are usually perceived to have clear images. An image represents feelings, attitudes, opinions, and facts about a medium.

 

2. Loyalty

Audiences often like some media so much that they develop loyalties that go beyond economic constraint. An April 2009 study by the Pew Research Center found that 52 percent of the people questioned rated a television set as a necessity, slightly ahead of a home computer (50 percent) and a cell phone (49 percent).1 Loyalty to certain media, however, does not necessarily mean that the loyal audience will perceive media advertisements similarly or buy more of the advertised products. Other factors affect buying, including the need to have more information about a brand. If the audience already has a great deal of brand knowledge, the audience might respond to the advertising. Generally, when changes have been made in the brand or there have been changes in the content or creative style of advertising, then the message will influence buying behavior to some extent.

 

3. Media usage and subsequent behavior

Advertisers who buy space in a magazine generally assume they are reaching all readers of that particular periodical, but some subscribers do not read each issue immediately and many have back issues at home they have not even opened. The Audience Accumulation study by Mediamark Research & Intelligence, LLC, (MRI) found that as many as 10 percent of a magazine’s audience can occur six months after the issue date.If asked why they have not read magazines they are paying for, they might respond that they do intend to read them when they have some free time. The potential for reaching these people exists, but it takes a long time for some magazines to achieve their ultimate potential audience. There is a widespread assumption that television sells better than print media because television is intrusive and its audiences tend to react to the medium more regularly than they read magazines. Television programs featuring famous persons or interesting national events do draw huge audiences. Yet audience response variesgreatly to ads carried in these programs. Some advertisers seem to sell their products well; others don’t.

For example, in 2000, at the height of the new technology bubble, the Super Bowl featured 19 dot-com advertisers—accounting for almost one-third of all the commercials in the game. A year later the majority of these companies were bankrupt due to poorly thought-out business plans and the general decline of the technology sector. Only four online companies placed ads in Super Bowl 2001. By 2010, Super Bowl XLIV had 9 dot-com advertisers out of the total 75 commercials.3 All of this suggests that there is more to a successful advertising campaign than selecting media vehicles that deliver large audiences. It is difficult, however, to assess the effectiveness of one media vehicle’s ability to sell the advertised products on the basis of the size of its audience or the number of advertisements it carries. Large audiences do not automatically buy more than smaller audiences. In the end, the quality of an ad’s creative message and how memorable it is has more influence on the ad’s ability to sell products than any inherent qualities of the medium that delivers it.

Consumers simply do not pay attention to commercials if they do not need the brand or product and they already know a lot about the brand. They have developed the ability to see and hear a message and then forget it. Perhaps this is caused by an overload of communication, known as semantic satiation. Furthermore, sometimes audiences pay attention to commercials or print ads but don’t respond immediately.

 

4. Interactive television

Interactive television has been talked about for many years and is a reality today on cable television or online streaming video. In the context of media planning, it is an advertising message in conventional television that allows the viewer, with the click of a button on the remote, to order a product, request additional information, or initiate other communication with the advertiser. The leading supplier of this service is TiVo, the first and now the largest branded user interface with DVR. Cable services like Comcast have their own generic interface, but TiVo is the most widely known branded service.

Interactive advertising appears in the form of a small graphic, or tag, that appears on the screen during commercials in specially prepared programming or during long-form infomercials for such products as automobiles, vacation destinations, financial services, and so on. By clicking on the tag, viewers notify the advertiser of their interest in the product. Because their name, address, and other contact information are registered with the cable company or TiVo, the information or further entertainment is automatically forwarded. In February, 2010, Canoe Ventures (www.canoe-ventures.com) introduced its Request-For-Information (RFI) interactive platform that allows cable network viewers to interact with commercials using their remote control. For an additional charge, advertisers can add a banner on the bottom of the screen where viewers can respond to opinion polls; request additional information; receive coupons, discounts, or promotional giveaways; or provide other feedback to the advertiser.

 

5. Varied relationships between audiences and media