A major stress point for media researchers today is the inadequacy of established approaches in generating insights for the planning and buying of new and emerging ad media. On one hand we are constantly pushed towards sample-based, quantitative methods for they are often deemed as more rigorous. However, they often fall short in providing rich context that explains motives and attitudes driving new media use: particularly when such use must be related to the interactions with a product. On the other hand we are pulled towards innovative methods to work through challenges such as the low penetration or awareness of emerging channels and declining response rates. Such is the world of increasingly fragmented media markets. This paper is a discussion of what we have found to be more productive research methods for uncovering the impact of new media on brand awareness, consideration, and purchase as well as consumers' reliance on new digital platforms. It is our view of the strengths and weaknesses of the different options Microsoft Advertising have used of late. We share information on what our major research agency partners are doing to inject innovation into their practice. As conclusion we make specific recommendations on how researchers can be progressive.
Luxury brands rely on carefully planned and executed marketing activity to appeal to the emotions and cultivate an image of exclusivity, but as their customers increasingly spend time with digital media, they must wrestle with decisions about whether and how to extend their communications into a world more associated with social inclusion and rational, direct-response advertising. This presentation will highlight the key findings from an international study of luxury consumerism and digital media, conducted by London-based media research agency Essential on behalf of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions and KR Media.
PPM commercial audience estimates offer insight about consumers' avoidance of tv commercials. Total commercial avoidance, an average 7%, is composed of nearly six- tenths channel switching and four-tenths due to other 'interruptions'. Program content appears to be the strongest predictor of avoidance. Gender and age exacerbate commercial avoidance with men, teens, and younger adults showing above-average churn. There is also variation in the relationship of exact, commercial-minute audience levels to average-minute audience. High-churn formats produce lower indices with even lower levels for men. In other words, there is potential for bias against particular media formats and particular targets in today's currency-based 'proxy' measures of commercial audience -- average minute and AQH. PPM and Apollo estimates would help identify sources of bias and alternatives going forward. These results represent progress toward quantifying the mechanics of commercial avoidance for buyers and sellers. They also demonstrate the value of PPM's near-passive, direct, and precise capture of persons'-level media exposure.
The authors recently analyzed the audience delivery and efficiency patterns of selected schedules for three different client planning scenarios. This analysis was undertaken in order to identify which of three analytical approaches would deliver the most efficient and effective results for print advertising under different marketing conditions. This paper briefly outlines the strategic and client accountability changes that are driving the marketplace today. It then highlights the planning results from both initial and improved media schedules and provides our observations on what the publishing and media planning communities should strive for business-wise as we move further into the marketing mix-multimedia optimization era.
Arbitron's Portable People Meter (PPM) results provide 'real' cross-media duplication between radio and television. PPM differs from present currency-based estimation of random duplication between independent sources for local-market radio and television. This investigation, employing a variety of schedule variations for a variety of demographics, finds that random estimation generally overstates PPM's unified radio and television capture. Results show variations by target demo as well as by the scope of the plan itself. As PPM measurement is deployed beyond Philadelphia, its passive capture of cross-media flow promises a better basis for estimating the value of media-mix schedules.
This paper presents early cross-media results from Arbitron's 2002 portable people meter (PPM) panel in the Philadelphia (United States) market. Previous results from the small-scale PPM panel in Wilmington (Delaware) in 2001 suggested important variations in cross-media duplication between radio and television. The present results build upon the earlier findings, extending the learning from PPM's capture of both television and radio via a single, unified measurement platform. This unified cross-media panel method provides insight into the consumer target's media behavior and to various effective strategies to maximize target reach and efficiency.