Posts Tagged ‘Media Planning’

February 23rd, 2011

TV product placement goes live in the UK from February 28th

If you are tiring of the hype about how your brand can’t possibly survive the next week without a social media strategy, you may be interested in another quieter revolution that is about to go live on our TV screens. On the 28th February product placement goes live on UK TV.  Whilst this doesn’t directly involve a computer (unless someone submits one), this is a significant new media opportunity for UK advertisers.

Earlier this week an edition of Coronation Street (the UK’s leading and longest running soap) featured a kitchen shot which included a packet of, I think, ‘Honey Nut Cheerios’. Take note, that’s not ‘Cheerios’ or ‘Honey Nut Loops’ but ‘Honey Nut Cheerios’. If like me you find these sub-text jokes by ITV’s production teams rather amusing you’ll be sad to know that their days are almost certainly numbered. But all is not lost; the commercial opportunites around product placement are set to mushroom and that’s good news for advertisers.

From February 28th we can expect to see more popular high street brands making star appearances on the breakfast tables of some of the UK’s leading programmes.  The opportunities are of course almost endless. Many TV programmes feature kitchens, kitchen tables,  cars, clothes, shoes, TVs, mobile phones, T-shirt logos, food products and drinks to name but a few. As the year progresses we are likely to see more branded products appearing more overtly in programme content. This raises two questions for advertisers and marketers.

First, how do brands make it work? I see product placement as being a bit like sponsorship where the route to impact, acceptance and increased brand salience is through careful targeting of content, environments and associations. A brand that makes the right association with a point of view, a cause (even if only fictional) or a personality may well benefit. A brand that gets it wrong may suffer the indignity of product mis-placement.

The second question is how do we evaluate it? This one is tricky because the returns are unlikely to be short term or immediately obvious. Product placement is not as intrusive as advertising; the advertiser is not granted sole use of the screen for the ad slot they’ve purchased. Product placement sits on screen within another set of messages that are being received in different ways by viewers. This carries a potential risk of intrusion which needs to be measured and managed as carefully as any awareness or sales upside.

In the US where product placement has been around for some time, there are media tracking companies who use image recognition software to measure how long a product has appeared for. They then attach audience size and cost data to provide a value for the reach and length of exposure obtained for the brand.  It seems that in the main product placement evaluation is limited to calculating the media value of brand exposure and to measuring recall and awareness.

One interesting metric could be changes in online brand searches as a result of product placement views or mentions. I know from working with advertisers that just one mention of a product in a property makeover programme for example can drive a significant spike in online brand search activity and e-commerce sales. It may be that the granularity of search data may allow it to emerge as a useful currency for measuring the short and medium term effectieveness of product placement.

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June 9th, 2009

Online advertising works beyond the click

It’s an ongoing debate: just what influence does digital communication create beyond clicks? Well the short answer is a lot. It contributes the following:  subsequent search visits (product and brand terms),  subsequent direct site visits (over the short and long term), visits to retail premises in the case of retailers, visits to attractions in the case of leisure destinations and shifts in brand and product reputation in the case of branding messages and content.

Recent research from iProspect / Forrester (May 2009) supports this view. It reveals that of those who viewed online ads on an ad funded web site,  only 31% actually clicked, but a further 48% either searched for the product in a search engine or subsequently visited the site via a direct browser visit. A further 9% reported that they investigated further through social media or message boards.

forrester-click-behaviour-june09

Readers who run online campaigns will observe that few online campaigns generate click through rates as high as 31%, in fact, most display campaigns generate click rates of about 1% of that, i.e  0.31% or less.  If we factor down the other responses by a similar level, then we get to 0.27% performing a direct search and 0.21% visiting the advertising site directly through their browser.  Whilst these numbers may appear low, it does indicate that responses are many and varied and exceed the response counted as clicks alone.

I’d argue that when it comes to branding effects, such as awareness, attribution and considerations scores,  the numbers may be higher than the figures above suggest.  The problem is that we have not fully understood how to quantify these additional branding effects. There are products able to isolate groups people who are exposed to online communications and, via online surveys, compare their advertising and brand awareness to non-exposed groups, and these can reveal interesting short term results. See some of those here.

But often the changes in awareness and consideration build slowly over time, particularly in products which have to be advertised almost constantly in order to reach comparatively small groups of active buyers. Mobile network O2 springs to mind here.  Whilst much of its online display activity is designed to attract potential buyers to its online shop, there is no doubt that the constant presence of O2’s blue and white imagery on the UK’s top 250 or so web sites helps to maintain and reaffirm its credentials as a player with a big interest in the digital space.  Would we still see O2 that way of we had never seen its distinctive blue online display presence?

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June 1st, 2009

TV media planning for site traffic generation

If you are an advertiser looking to use TV to drive traffic to your web site or increase brand term searches, you can do a lot worse than employ some well tested techniques from the world of DRTV advertising to improve your results. In this short think-piece, I am going to review some of the techniques that can be borrowed from DRTV media planning to increase site visits from your DRTV media spend.

Before we go into techniques, it’s important to recognise that measurement is key to the response planning process. Many believe TV is not accountable, but in fact, audience delivery is measured on a minute by minute basis across the day. The BARB audience measurement panel allows us measure the audience size and composition for any spot on almost any channel at any time of day. This is minute by minute data which is ideal for matching to your second source of planning data; your own web traffic logs.

Using a combination of these two data sources enables advertisers to track web traffic, leads and sales back to their point of TV origin. So for example, we may be able to conclude that sales for product X with a value exceeding £50 are most likely to be gained from a given channel at a given time of day on a given day of week (which was traded at a given cost).

It is also possible to undertake other tests by developing a text matrix and deploying it over a given time period.  For example an advertiser can run a creative effectiveness test by running creative 1 over week 1 and creative 2 over week 4 (leaving a gap of two weeks to eradicate lag from the first campaign). From a test like this it may be possible to conclude that creative treatment 1 is more effective at driving online sales than creative treatment 2.

What do the results look like?

If you imagine that weekdays are twice as cost effective as weekends, and Channel 2 is twice as effective as other channels, and that creative 1 is three times as effective as creative 2, then you are already into the type of performance multipliers that can make the difference between an average campaign and a very strong ROI performance.

Let’s now look at this in currency terms. Let’s assume that an advertiser is experiencing a TV to Web cost per sale for a financial services product of £500 across broadcast media. Our day of week selection could reduce that to £250, our channel selection could reduce it to £125 and our creative selection could reduce it to £62.50.  This means the difference between a TV generated web sale costing £500 and a TV generated web sale costing £62.50.  These are the differences between making a sale at a significant potential profit and making a sale at a loss.

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May 27th, 2009

Does TV advertising drive web site traffic?

The answer to this question is a resounding yes. In my experience  - and if you are running optimised TV activity - then you can expect to see web response rates to TV activity of between 0.1% and 1% (measured as site visits/TV impacts).  That’s between 1,000 and 10,000 site visits per 1 million TV impacts.  This is much higher than traditional phone-based DRTV where a good response rate is around 0.05%, with weaker campaigns performing at 0.005% or even less.  Of course one could argue that a click is a much less committed response than a person to person phone call and this is generally reflected in a much lower online conversion rate from click to sale.

What do these web response rates this mean from a cost efficiency point of view? If you are paying a £3.00 CPM for TV impacts then 1 million TV impacts will cost £3,000. At a 0.5% site visit rate from TV, we’d see 5,000 site visits. This gives a cost per visit of £0.60 (60p) each. That’s a reasonable cost per click when compared to online sources of click traffic - especially search engines.

The challenge  is to make sure that the clicks you generate from TV are high quality clicks, but this is becoming easier as TV fragments and targeting opportunities increase. So how do you optimise TV to web site activity?There are two answers to this question. One is optimising how you select and use TV channels and the other is how you manage traffic when it comes to your site. Were going to look at how you achieve these objectives in a mini series over the next few posts.

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December 16th, 2008

UK advertising predictions 2009

I think 2009 is going to be a year of immense change in the UK media landscape. But it’s not going to be the same for everyone. I predict that it will be a bad year for the traditional offline players whilst newer digital players will find 2009 painful but manageable. For many traditional media owners 2009 will be about survival - particularly in print. There is no doubt that the UK media scene will look very different in December 2009 to how it looks in December 2008.

Before we get into the detail, I think it makes sense to divide my 10 predictions into two groups: “structural change” and “reality checks”. The “structural change” predictions deal with fundamental corporate realignments that will be forced upon businesses in order to survive in the UK communications industry. The “reality-check” predictions relate to businesses that will have to make significant changes in how they operate to remain healthy and be in good shape to meet the challenges of the next few years. So below is a summary of what I think will happen in online and offline marketing and media community in 2009.

Structural changes (1-5):

1. The full effect of the flow of advertising revenue from offline to online media in recent years will make a profound impact on the the UK media scene in 2009. Media owner denial about underlying structural shifts in our industry will evolve into acceptance and the adoption of a ‘change or die’ corporate mentality. On reaching this enlightenment, media owners will use the recession as an excuse to make the big changes they’ve been putting off for years. There will be ruthless cost-cutting, divestment, re-structuring and closures.

2. In print, some established brands will collapse. One national newspaper will close or be sold. But the worst pain will be reserved for regional and local media which will come under severe financial pressure because of the combined effect of the shift to online, the crisis in the housing market and reduced expenditure from advertisers, particularly car dealers and retailers. Regional and local directories like Yell and Thomson will also have a very difficult year. All in all I predict regional media will be in for a torrid year, and suffer worse perhaps than any other channel.

3. In broadcast there is also going to be serious financial trouble. Some smaller TV stations may suffer badly and probably collapse. ITV’s situation will get steadily worse. Sky will continue to feel the impact of Freeview through declining rates of subscription growth, but its subscription base will make it less dependent on advertising revenue and allow it to weather the recession in reasonably good shape. Problems will come for Sky if the recession goes on for more than a year and consumers think twice about re-subscribing. Regional radio will suffer badly because of its dependence on cars and retail.

4. Online will not be exempt from any pain (see also 6,7,8) but it will be display advertising networks that have to bear the brunt of it. The whole area of blind networks delivering view based conversions will come under increased scrutiny. These advertising / business models will be under the magnifying glass of both advertisers and investors. Ad revenues will decline and investors will start to duck out. This will cause a shake out in online display advertising networks; some will fold and the lucky ones will be taken over.

5. On the agency side of the business, some traditional agencies could run into serious financial trouble and some may even go under - particularly those with an over-dependence on automotive and retail brands. As usual in a recession, those agencies able to prove a causal link between their activity and sales are likely to suffer less than those agencies who can’t.

Reality-checks (6-10):

6. The business models of social media stars like Facebook will come under increased financial scrutiny as brand owners realise it’s very difficult to communicate in these environments and investors realise it’s therefore very difficult to make money. Some social media sites will be bought up by bigger online and perhaps offline players seeking to broaden their offering.

7. Microsoft may concede it can’t win in paid search and may even surrender and divest from it. Even if this doesn’t happen, watch out for other significant online and offline investments from Microsoft.

8. Google will show signs of maturity and will be forced into making a big move to maintain momentum and investor interest. Anticipate something like a big traditional media owner purchase, the takeover of a big social media player or more mobile developments.

9. There will be significant shedding of non-core corporate assets across the board. More companies will lose patience with their seedlings and turn out the light. Rather ironically from a corporate point of view, traditional media businesses are likely to close their digital businesses. This will reflect the fact that the dominant business model in these companies cannot yet monetise online and digital profitably.

10. Consumers will be lackadaisical about very high speed broadband. As the revelations about high speed actually being slow speed gain more momentum, offers of higher speeds will be met with increased cynicism. As a result, take-up will be slow and providers may run into problems. Those companies betting that offering even higher speeds will add new life to a maturing market may lose.

Despite all this, here’s to a Happy Christmas and 2009.

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December 1st, 2008

Advertising Frequency and Diminishing Marginal Utility

Economists have a concept called Diminishing Marginal Utility. This means that each additional time a consumer consumes something they get less satisfaction from consuming it. So, if I have one coffee, I find it very satisfying, two could be OK, but by the time I get to three I’m not getting much additional satisfaction, infact, I’m going off coffee pretty fast. And if I were to drink ten coffees I’d feel like I was being tortured.

Now let me apply this thinking to the world of TV advertising and in particular, sponsorship. In the UK, quality drama is a favourite for sponsorship. One of the reasons for this is that these programmes attract a high quality loyal audience who make an appointment to view. Certain drama strands can be sponsored heavily in a cross-programme deal covering different programmes in the same genre. Whilst this may appear to present great media value it can mean over-exposure for both brands and consumers. Seeing a break bumper a couple of times is fine, but seeing the same branded break bumper ten times in the same evening can seem like drinking that tenth cup of coffee.

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