Chapter 6

Planning for and analyzing advertising media

Some Useful Terminology: Media Versus Vehicles

• Media: are the general communication methods that carry advertising messages— that is, television, magazines, newspapers, and so on.

• Vehicles: are the specific broadcast programs or print choices in which advertisements are placed. For example, television is a specific medium, and American Idol, CBS Evening News, and Monday Night Football are vehicles for carrying television advertisements.

Selecting the target audience

• Effective media strategy requires, first, that the target audience be pinpointed.

• Four major types of information are used in segmenting target audiences for media strategy purposes.

1. buyographics, 2. geographics, 3. demographics, 4. lifestyle/psychographics

Selecting the target audience

• Buyographics: Product usage information (buyographics), when available, generally provides the most meaningful basis for determining which target audience(s) should be pinpointed for receiving an advertising message.

Specifying Media Objectives

• Having pinpointed the audience to whom advertising messages will be directed, the next media-planning consideration involves specifying the objectives.

• Media planners, in setting objectives, confront issues such as the following: 1. what proportion of a target audience do we want to reach with our advertising

message during a specified period. 2. how frequently do we need to expose the audience to our message during this

period 3. how much total advertising is necessary to accomplish the reach and frequency

objectives, 4. how should we allocate the advertising budget over time, 5. how close to the time of purchase should the target audience be exposed to our

advertising message, 6. what is the most economically justifiable way to accomplish the other

objectives?

Technical Terms

• technical terms associated with each of these six objectives:

(1) reach

(2) frequency

(3) weight

(4) continuity

(5) recency

(6) cost

Reach

• Reach: represents the percentage of the audience that is exposed, at least once, during a specified time frame to the vehicles in which our advertising message is inserted.

• time frame used by the majority of media planners is a four-week period.

Determinants of Reach

Factors increasing reach:

1. use multiple media

2. diversify vehicles within each medium

3. vary the dayparts in the case of radio and TV advertising

Frequency

• Frequency signifies the number of times, on average, during the media-planning period that members of the target audience are exposed to the media vehicles that carry a brand’s advertising message.

• Weight Volume of audience delivered by an advertising campaign in terms of the number of advertisements

Weight

• weight metrics:

1. gross ratings points

2. target ratings points

What Are Ratings?

• In advertising, the term ratings simply refers to the percentage of an audience that has an opportunity to see an advertisement placed in that vehicle.

• Gross Rating Points (GRPs): Gross rating points, or GRPs, reflect the gross weight that a particular advertising schedule has delivered.

• GRPs indicate the total coverage, that audience, exposed to a particular advertising schedule.

Ratings

• Target Rating Points (TRPs): Target rating points, or TRPs, adjust vehicle ratings to reflect just those individuals who match the advertiser’s target audience

How Many Exposures Are Needed?

• three-exposure hypothesis, which addresses the minimum number of exposures needed for advertising to be effective.

• Herbert Krugman, argued that a consumer’s initial

exposure to a brand’s advertising initiates a response of “what is it?”

• The second exposure triggers a response of “what of it?” • Third exposure and those thereafter are merely reminders

of the information that the consumer already has learned from the first two exposures.

Effective Reach Planning in Advertising Practice

• The range of effective reach, then, can be thought of as three to 10 exposures during a designated media-planning period.

• Reach planning generally leads to using multiple media rather than depending exclusively on television, which is often the strategy when using the GRP criterion. Prime-time television is especially effective in terms of generating high levels of reach but may be deficient in terms of achieving effective reach.

Continuity

• Continuity involves the matter of how advertising should be allocated during the course of an advertising campaign.

• Advertisers have three general alternatives related to allocating the budget over the course of the campaign: continuous, pulsing, and flighting schedules.

Continuous Schedule

• In a continuous advertising schedule, an equal or relatively equal number of ad dollars are invested throughout the campaign.

Pulsing

• In a pulsing advertising schedule, some advertising is used during every period of the campaign, but the amount of advertising varies from period to period.

Flighting

• In a flighting schedule, the advertiser varies expenditures throughout the campaign and allocates zero expenditures in some months.

Recency planning

• Ephron has formulated an argument favoring continuous advertising that he terms the principle of recency, also called the shelf-space model or the theory of effective weekly planning.

• The recency principle, or shelf-space model, is built on three interrelated ideas:

1. that consumers’ first exposure to an advertisement for a brand is the most powerful.

2. that advertising’s primary role is to influence brand choice.

3. that achieving a high level of weekly reach for a brand should be emphasized over acquiring heavy frequency.

Cost Consideration

• Media planners attempt to allocate the advertising budget in a cost-efficient manner subject to satisfying other objectives.

• One of the most important and universally used

indicators of media efficiency is the cost-per-thousand criterion.

• The measure can be refined to mean the cost of

reaching 1,000 members of the target audience, excluding those people who fall outside the target market. This refined measure is designated CPM-TM.