Advertising Primer 9: Media Planning
Media planning and buying involves researching and selecting the best media outlets through which to advertise, and then scheduling and purchasing the ads or airtime that will best fit the advertising strategy at hand.
Let's take a look at the major media vehicles available to advertisers:
1. Television:
Despite it's relatively high cost, TV is considered to be one of the most effective advertising mediums. Video is the most captivating format of delivering advertising messages. TV reaches larger audiences than any other media format. However, the popularity of TV advertising is its greatest downfall: so many ads appear on TV that it's often hard for your ad to get noticed among the clutter. Still, television is unquestionably the king of media outlets. This doesn't mean it's perfect for every ad message, just that it's the most popular in terms of advertising dollars spent.
2. Internet:
The first thing to note about online advertising is that this list is in order of most advertising dollars spent per medium. Yes, that's right: more money is now spent on internet advertising than for any other media format except television.
The internet is really a hybrid of existing media formats. Originally it was very newspaper-like as most web content was just text and photos. Today, it's a strong competitor to TV and radio for audio and video content as well. Internet continues to explode: a recent study showed a quarter of users sacrificed eating or sleeping to spend more time online. Since internet access is now moving to TV boxes and mobile devices, its pervasiveness and versatility will only increase.
Research shows that online display ads (banner ads and the like) garner higher brand recognition than radio or TV advertising.
The low cost of online advertising combined with it's many targeting options are by far its greatest advantages. Search advertising (Google text ads, for example) has an extremely low cost of entry and advertisers don't pay for impressions but only for clicks. Almost no other form of advertising allows you to pay only when your ad gets results. Further, internet advertising—in particular search advertising—allows for very specific targeting of audiences. By selecting keywords, topics, and even geographic regions where ads will display, advertisers can zero in on the audiences they wish to reach.
3. Newspapers
Poor newspapers don't get any good press lately. We're constantly hearing of their demise, but while it's true their circulation numbers have dropped substantially, they're probably not as bad off as you'd expect. Today, around 50 million newspapers are distributed around the US. That's off the 60 million or so for newspaper's high water mark, and the industry is certainly struggling, but newspapers still command a strong 3rd position among advertising media.
Newspaper advertising has two big advantages. First, research shows newspaper readers are more likely to be looking for something to buy vs. consumers of other media. TV viewers tend to be looking for entertainment and they find television ads distracting and annoying. Newspaper readers, on the other hand, often buy papers to view the classifieds and other ads.
Second, newspaper readers tend to view ads with more credibility. Newspapers are typically perceived as a more serious media than television, internet or other outlets. Studies indicate this perception actually carries over to ads displayed in newspapers.
Among other benefits of newspapers for readers is that they can hang on to ads and look at them again later (not as easily done with TV and radio), and of course this tends to benefit advertisers as well. Another plus for advertisers is that newspaper ads can contain lots of text listings (grocery or auto ads, etc.). Also, ad space can be reserved very near the last minute. Finally, newspaper readership tends towards older adults which is perfect for certain products and services.
4. Direct Mail:
Often easy to forget, direct mail is one of the largest and most effective methods of communicating with prospects. The cost for a large mailing can be high, but direct mail has the advantage of precise targeting through internal or external lists. Many companies offer paid access to mailing lists that can be very specialized and allow advertisers to precisely target their audiences. Direct mail tends to have low respect (let's be honest, when we say "direct mail" the consumer hears "junk mail"). However, response rates for direct mail are relatively high. No doubt this is in part because direct mail pieces are most frequently opened by a household's primary decider of purchases.
5. Magazines:
The magazine industry shares many of the same benefits and risks as the newspaper industry, but there are also a few distinct differences. For one, magazines have a longer shelf life. People tend to hang on to magazines for a weeks or months and refer back to them several times, whereas newspapers are thrown out in a day or so. Magazines are also of better quality so they allow for higher production standards and more visually appealing ads.
Magazines allow for better targeting than newspapers since they tend to focus on specific topics like hobbies, health, technology, etc. However, as with newspapers, ads in magazines are usually viewed with greater credibility by consumers vs. ads on TV or radio.
Disadvantages of magazine advertising include the high cost of ads and the long lead time required to reserve advertising space and submit ads.
6. Radio: If you have a very limited budget but still want to run a large number of ads for maximum repetition, radio may be your media of choice. While radio's heyday quickly faded with the rise of television, radio didn't go away. It transformed into a mobile medium. People tend to listen to radio in their cars or while picnicking or jogging (though that last use has declined with the advent of portable tape, CD, and MP3 players). However, radio listeners tend to be more distracted with other activities than TV viewers or print media readers.
Because radio is an audio-only medium, people tend to use their mind's eye to fill in the missing visuals, something that can actually increase their personal connection to an advertisement. Unlike other media, radio has the added benefit of being able to schedule or edit close to airtime.
7. Directories: Like direct mail, we often don't think about directory advertising, but advertisements in directories have several benefits. First, people browsing directories like phone book Yellow Pages are specifically looking for a source to buy a product or service. Second, around 90% of people who do make use of the Yellow Pages subsequently call, visit, or make a purchase from the listings they find. In fact, for every dollar spent on directory advertising, companies see at least one dollar in return.
8. Outdoor: This category includes all billboards and posters in public areas. It's the cheapest form of advertising and it's a good choice for branding campaigns. Billboard advertising is quite literally in your face. However, while outdoor ads can really stand out, viewers are often distracted with other activities. Studies show that unless a person consciously thinks about an advertisement for at least 15 seconds after they see the ad, the image will not be transferred to their long-term memory and will be forgotten.
Key to scheduling advertising is selecting the best time to promote your product or service to the target audience. Aperture is the term marketers use to define the moment in a person's day, week, month, or year when they are most likely to be receptive to ads for a given product. In other words, just before dinner time is a great moment for pizza and restaurant ads. Near tax time is a great time to advertise tax preparation services, and so on. For ads to be most effective, they need to be timed at these "Apertures" when audiences are most ready to respond.
Reach is the percentage of people in a given market who see an ad at least one time. Frequency is the average number of times people in that market see the ad. Television, for example, tends to have high reach because a larger percentage of Americans watch TV. However, TV is costlier than radio which means an advertiser might achieve greater frequency via radio using the same ad budget. Effective frequency represents the magic combination of frequency and reach at which people respond to an ad.
To be effective, TV ads must be viewed by individuals at least 3 times or more. Rarely will an advertisement have it's intended effect when it is only seen one time. One way advertisers maximize their ad dollars is by splitting ad exposure across cheaper media with high frequency and more expensive media with high reach. Selecting multiple media outlets for an ad campaign is called a media mix, and it's a crucial part of the media planning process.
One thing to watch out for is wasted reach: spending ad dollars on expanded reach to audiences that aren't interested or don't constitute your target market. Wasted reach is actually wasted money because no amount of advertising to these audiences will increase sales.
The actual number of times an ad is viewed (or heard) is called the ad's impressions. This is not exactly the same as the number of times the ad appears because impressions specifically count how many times people actually see or hear the ad. This means a newspaper's impressions could be smaller than its circulation if some of the newspapers are discarded and the ads are never seen. It also means the impressions could be greater than circulation if on average more than one person reads each newspaper.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM) is a frequently used measure of cost efficiency for advertisements. It is simply put the price paid by the advertiser for every 1,000 ads that reach a target audience.
The length of time an ad will be run is called duration. In general, the longer an ad runs, the more response it will get until a certain point when the audience tires of seeing the ad. This point is called wearout. Like wasted reach, wearout should be carefully avoided as an overused ad can actually harm the brand by annoying and irritating audiences.
Continuity refers to whether ads are run at regular intervals (a continuous schedule) or if they are shown in bunches. A pulsing schedule means ads are shown at a certain minimum level at all times with ad frequency temporarily increasing during certain periods (usually during peak purchase times). A flighting or bursting schedule means ads are shown in bursts with periods of complete inactivity. These strategies are typically employed to extend an advertising budget and increase campaign effectiveness over time.
One of the greatest difficulties facing advertisers today is the problem of creating and displaying ads that stand out against all the other ads on a given medium. Ads are enormously prevalent in our lives. So much so, that we have learned to tune them out. Advertisers must work hard to create ads that will capture (and keep) audience attention and then choose the media and scheduling that will most minimize clutter. Since all media suffer from too much ad clutter today, one way advertisers try to get around this problem is by sponsoring an entire hour (or more) of programming.
I can't stress enough how important it is for advertisers to put themselves in their audience's shoes and view ad concepts in light of ad clutter. When advertisers look at concept ads they often do it in a quiet meeting room or at their desk, staring at the ad for several minutes, discussing the ad, viewing it from different angles, etc. This is not how your audience will see your ad. In the case of TV, for example, audiences view your ad for 15-30 seconds sandwiched in between seven other ads and additional promos while they wait for their show to return. Or else they simply walk out of the room. Keeping this thought in mind will help you create and place better ads.
Media Selection
Let's take a look at the major media vehicles available to advertisers:
1. Television:
Despite it's relatively high cost, TV is considered to be one of the most effective advertising mediums. Video is the most captivating format of delivering advertising messages. TV reaches larger audiences than any other media format. However, the popularity of TV advertising is its greatest downfall: so many ads appear on TV that it's often hard for your ad to get noticed among the clutter. Still, television is unquestionably the king of media outlets. This doesn't mean it's perfect for every ad message, just that it's the most popular in terms of advertising dollars spent.
2. Internet:
The first thing to note about online advertising is that this list is in order of most advertising dollars spent per medium. Yes, that's right: more money is now spent on internet advertising than for any other media format except television.
The internet is really a hybrid of existing media formats. Originally it was very newspaper-like as most web content was just text and photos. Today, it's a strong competitor to TV and radio for audio and video content as well. Internet continues to explode: a recent study showed a quarter of users sacrificed eating or sleeping to spend more time online. Since internet access is now moving to TV boxes and mobile devices, its pervasiveness and versatility will only increase.
Research shows that online display ads (banner ads and the like) garner higher brand recognition than radio or TV advertising.
The low cost of online advertising combined with it's many targeting options are by far its greatest advantages. Search advertising (Google text ads, for example) has an extremely low cost of entry and advertisers don't pay for impressions but only for clicks. Almost no other form of advertising allows you to pay only when your ad gets results. Further, internet advertising—in particular search advertising—allows for very specific targeting of audiences. By selecting keywords, topics, and even geographic regions where ads will display, advertisers can zero in on the audiences they wish to reach.
3. Newspapers
Poor newspapers don't get any good press lately. We're constantly hearing of their demise, but while it's true their circulation numbers have dropped substantially, they're probably not as bad off as you'd expect. Today, around 50 million newspapers are distributed around the US. That's off the 60 million or so for newspaper's high water mark, and the industry is certainly struggling, but newspapers still command a strong 3rd position among advertising media.
Newspaper advertising has two big advantages. First, research shows newspaper readers are more likely to be looking for something to buy vs. consumers of other media. TV viewers tend to be looking for entertainment and they find television ads distracting and annoying. Newspaper readers, on the other hand, often buy papers to view the classifieds and other ads.
Second, newspaper readers tend to view ads with more credibility. Newspapers are typically perceived as a more serious media than television, internet or other outlets. Studies indicate this perception actually carries over to ads displayed in newspapers.
Among other benefits of newspapers for readers is that they can hang on to ads and look at them again later (not as easily done with TV and radio), and of course this tends to benefit advertisers as well. Another plus for advertisers is that newspaper ads can contain lots of text listings (grocery or auto ads, etc.). Also, ad space can be reserved very near the last minute. Finally, newspaper readership tends towards older adults which is perfect for certain products and services.
4. Direct Mail:
Often easy to forget, direct mail is one of the largest and most effective methods of communicating with prospects. The cost for a large mailing can be high, but direct mail has the advantage of precise targeting through internal or external lists. Many companies offer paid access to mailing lists that can be very specialized and allow advertisers to precisely target their audiences. Direct mail tends to have low respect (let's be honest, when we say "direct mail" the consumer hears "junk mail"). However, response rates for direct mail are relatively high. No doubt this is in part because direct mail pieces are most frequently opened by a household's primary decider of purchases.
5. Magazines:
The magazine industry shares many of the same benefits and risks as the newspaper industry, but there are also a few distinct differences. For one, magazines have a longer shelf life. People tend to hang on to magazines for a weeks or months and refer back to them several times, whereas newspapers are thrown out in a day or so. Magazines are also of better quality so they allow for higher production standards and more visually appealing ads.
Magazines allow for better targeting than newspapers since they tend to focus on specific topics like hobbies, health, technology, etc. However, as with newspapers, ads in magazines are usually viewed with greater credibility by consumers vs. ads on TV or radio.
Disadvantages of magazine advertising include the high cost of ads and the long lead time required to reserve advertising space and submit ads.
6. Radio: If you have a very limited budget but still want to run a large number of ads for maximum repetition, radio may be your media of choice. While radio's heyday quickly faded with the rise of television, radio didn't go away. It transformed into a mobile medium. People tend to listen to radio in their cars or while picnicking or jogging (though that last use has declined with the advent of portable tape, CD, and MP3 players). However, radio listeners tend to be more distracted with other activities than TV viewers or print media readers.
Because radio is an audio-only medium, people tend to use their mind's eye to fill in the missing visuals, something that can actually increase their personal connection to an advertisement. Unlike other media, radio has the added benefit of being able to schedule or edit close to airtime.
7. Directories: Like direct mail, we often don't think about directory advertising, but advertisements in directories have several benefits. First, people browsing directories like phone book Yellow Pages are specifically looking for a source to buy a product or service. Second, around 90% of people who do make use of the Yellow Pages subsequently call, visit, or make a purchase from the listings they find. In fact, for every dollar spent on directory advertising, companies see at least one dollar in return.
8. Outdoor: This category includes all billboards and posters in public areas. It's the cheapest form of advertising and it's a good choice for branding campaigns. Billboard advertising is quite literally in your face. However, while outdoor ads can really stand out, viewers are often distracted with other activities. Studies show that unless a person consciously thinks about an advertisement for at least 15 seconds after they see the ad, the image will not be transferred to their long-term memory and will be forgotten.
Media Scheduling
Key to scheduling advertising is selecting the best time to promote your product or service to the target audience. Aperture is the term marketers use to define the moment in a person's day, week, month, or year when they are most likely to be receptive to ads for a given product. In other words, just before dinner time is a great moment for pizza and restaurant ads. Near tax time is a great time to advertise tax preparation services, and so on. For ads to be most effective, they need to be timed at these "Apertures" when audiences are most ready to respond.
Reach is the percentage of people in a given market who see an ad at least one time. Frequency is the average number of times people in that market see the ad. Television, for example, tends to have high reach because a larger percentage of Americans watch TV. However, TV is costlier than radio which means an advertiser might achieve greater frequency via radio using the same ad budget. Effective frequency represents the magic combination of frequency and reach at which people respond to an ad.
To be effective, TV ads must be viewed by individuals at least 3 times or more. Rarely will an advertisement have it's intended effect when it is only seen one time. One way advertisers maximize their ad dollars is by splitting ad exposure across cheaper media with high frequency and more expensive media with high reach. Selecting multiple media outlets for an ad campaign is called a media mix, and it's a crucial part of the media planning process.
One thing to watch out for is wasted reach: spending ad dollars on expanded reach to audiences that aren't interested or don't constitute your target market. Wasted reach is actually wasted money because no amount of advertising to these audiences will increase sales.
The actual number of times an ad is viewed (or heard) is called the ad's impressions. This is not exactly the same as the number of times the ad appears because impressions specifically count how many times people actually see or hear the ad. This means a newspaper's impressions could be smaller than its circulation if some of the newspapers are discarded and the ads are never seen. It also means the impressions could be greater than circulation if on average more than one person reads each newspaper.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM) is a frequently used measure of cost efficiency for advertisements. It is simply put the price paid by the advertiser for every 1,000 ads that reach a target audience.
The length of time an ad will be run is called duration. In general, the longer an ad runs, the more response it will get until a certain point when the audience tires of seeing the ad. This point is called wearout. Like wasted reach, wearout should be carefully avoided as an overused ad can actually harm the brand by annoying and irritating audiences.
Continuity refers to whether ads are run at regular intervals (a continuous schedule) or if they are shown in bunches. A pulsing schedule means ads are shown at a certain minimum level at all times with ad frequency temporarily increasing during certain periods (usually during peak purchase times). A flighting or bursting schedule means ads are shown in bursts with periods of complete inactivity. These strategies are typically employed to extend an advertising budget and increase campaign effectiveness over time.
Avoiding Ad Clutter
One of the greatest difficulties facing advertisers today is the problem of creating and displaying ads that stand out against all the other ads on a given medium. Ads are enormously prevalent in our lives. So much so, that we have learned to tune them out. Advertisers must work hard to create ads that will capture (and keep) audience attention and then choose the media and scheduling that will most minimize clutter. Since all media suffer from too much ad clutter today, one way advertisers try to get around this problem is by sponsoring an entire hour (or more) of programming.
I can't stress enough how important it is for advertisers to put themselves in their audience's shoes and view ad concepts in light of ad clutter. When advertisers look at concept ads they often do it in a quiet meeting room or at their desk, staring at the ad for several minutes, discussing the ad, viewing it from different angles, etc. This is not how your audience will see your ad. In the case of TV, for example, audiences view your ad for 15-30 seconds sandwiched in between seven other ads and additional promos while they wait for their show to return. Or else they simply walk out of the room. Keeping this thought in mind will help you create and place better ads.
posted by David Board at
1:13 AM
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