Very often I am asked to say “Do I like this media plan or not?”. But it is not so often that I am also told which is the media objective each brand is after. Nor what are the marketing objectives.
To shed some light on this, I’m taking the example of 2 TV campaigns in Nov 2015 on Greek TV. Both brands belong to the group of the top 15 advertisers, so we will assume that both are handled with the professionalism expected and that both are after optimizing a number of quantitative and qualitative media KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): Television CPR (cost per rating), Television Average Rating, Coverage 1+, Coverage 3+, to state the basics.
So we assume media buyers did their best to secure efficiency: To buy at the minimum possible cost and also serve the qualitative media objectives.
Did they also do their best to secure effectiveness? (Effectiveness: Doing the right things) As these two brands belong to very competitively advertised categories and they interchange messages very often, we can assume that fast building of COVERAGE is the untold Media objective for both. So let’s see the chart of Coverage:
We see clearly that at the same level of GRPs, the coverage curves are very different. At 100 GRPs, so theoretically at same cost, Brand W had Reached 40% of the Target Group, while Brand B, only the 30%. This is a 33% difference in performance at the same level of GRPs, before an pricing discussion. Theoretically the results came at the same cost (but theoretically only, because our Benchmarks at MEDIARISK show quite different cost/GRP, even for similar size advertisers. But this of course is a different story).
Consider how important this is, in the case you are a retailer and you have three or five campaigns per week. You need fast building for each and every campaign, so to allow room for all.
In Greece this year we observe the same phenomenon as in the US: An explosion of the number of media accounts that are in review. And the more we see this, the more we have also a shift of the media buying decision making towards purchasing and away from marketing.
Thus it is time for the industry to move beyond the usual COST/GRP or CPR, that has become the “King KPI” and start considering the Cost/ Coverage point, which is also a pressure on Purchasing to co-evaluate a purely communication metric.
At MEDIARISK, part of our mission to support advertisers achieve their goals, is to check if the prerequisites of fast building coverage have been secured: