The days towards the end of a century seem to inspire an inflation of forecasts and predictions, and even more so when it comes to the end of a millennium. It is a good opportunity to look into the future, especially for publishing, which faces more and more competition from a growing number of media (which were themselves just a few years ago in the realms of fantasy). The speed of change and innovation is increasing rapidly. Publishing will have to adapt to these innovations if it is to survive.
The following contribution should demonstrate that new technologies allow us to exploit large data bases to a greater benefit. As an example we should look at a data set of advertising recognition scores, collected over a period of time. Normally it is rather tiresome to value recent scores against findings in previous surveys. However, new computer hardware and software developments, handling the enormous data volumes, let us create all sorts of cross examinations and evaluations of the collected scores. We can screen the advertisements by a large number of criteria, such as the line of business or product field, brand, format, used colour, split runs, recognition of the advertisement or brand, noted copy, and even some basic demographics of the respondents who claimed recognition. The only very difficult part is, to demonstrate the use of the new technologies on paper, by employing a technology which has been introduced by Gutenberg some 500 years ago. Therefore, the written contribution can only highlight the ease of the procedure by showing the different screens while the PC is doing an impressive and dynamic job with just a few key strokes.
More and more we seem to understand that the aim of media planning cannot alone mean to select the best bargain within the advertising vehicles available. An optimum use of media requires the integration of media planning along with the actual marketing planning. Thus, media decisions nowadays turn into strategic decisions. Questions regarding budget allocation or media mix in "the" saturated markets of today cannot be answered by the classic media selection programmes. Moreover, the classic programmes cannot give any realistic recommendation in view of market share developments of competitive brands. Saturated markets require a special planning programme, we call it SOM-Share of Mind, which takes into account, simultaneously, the advertiser's own advertising activties and those of the competition. The results of the enhanced evaluation, the SOM- scores, reveal the impact of "own" versus the competitive advertising contacts per target person against the background of the whole spectrum of the advertising exposures in the product field. This way, the question can be answered whether it is better to avoid competitive advertising by using different vehicles, or meet the competitor head-on.
The following paper describes a special analysis made using the German Verbraucher Analyse, a consumer analysis similar to other consumer usage/purchase research in many other European countries. For this reason our analysis can easily be duplicated elsewhere, giving the advertising industry the data they need for optimum media selection on a brand level. It is an inexpensive approach. Comparable data is usually available, it simply needs to be structured in a certain way. First, all informants have to be grouped by their different levels of probability of being exposed to print or TV. Second, the same informants will be weighted according to their individual product purchase/usage frequency and claimed brand preferences. Market shares calculated in that manner correspond surprisingly well with the retail audit data. That applies to the rank order of the market shares, not for actual volume. Generally speaking, heavy and medium print users are better potential consumers, however, it is not TRUE for all brands. There are numerous exceptions to this rule and a media planner needs to be aware of them. Inexpensive or traditional brands tend to be such exceptions. A reassuring result is that intensive users of both media, TV plus print, consume almost as much as more or less exclusive print media users. Therefore, a mix of media is a safe bet. The real benefit of this special analysis lies in the fact that it shows the best consumer potential for all important product fields in combination with the exposure probabilities within media groups.
Germany was and still is a print media market. How much longer, if at all, will it remain a print media market? Their pattern of advertising expenditures varied only marginally during the two decades before 1985 the beginning of private commercial TV in Germany, and a change of the media scene. After two or three years of fairly slow growth of cable penetration, terrestrial re- broadcasting of SAT-1, RTL+ and Tele 5 pushed the availability of the private stations to a more than recognisable level. They now reach 70 to 80% of all German homes. The fact that private TV can air commercials after 08:00 p.m., when public sector networks are not permitted to, has attracted many new advertisers to TV. Advertisers who used to consider the cost of producing commercials too high in view of limited air time available, now are willing to make the investment, buying time on both the new private stations and the public sector stations. This had a noticeable effect on the share of advertising money being invested in the various media. Although the private commercial stations still are 30% behind the nearly 100% penetration level of the public sector stations their share of advertising revenue is expected to exceed that of ARD and ZDF for the first time. The share of print advertising is declining, for both magazines and newspapers. Since print media are not in the position to stop this trend, they have to come up with strategic solutions to defend as much of their share as possible. One such solution can be studies of advertising effectiveness, an examination of cost effectiveness may show that the overall costs of time and production may make a TV campaign too expensive for certain target groups. Another may be an examination of whether a combination of TV and print may not only be more cost efficient, but also provides better learning, recall and recognition results.
The survey takes the basic problem of planning mixed media campaigns as its start line. Mixed media campaigns have two main objectives: 1. To avoid saturation or erosive effects through the accumulation of exposures in single media. 2. To make use of transfer effects and interaction which occurs when target groups are exposed to a campaign through different channels and, therefore, different types of advertisements. The main problem is that a mixed campaign does not necessarily lead to mixed media exposures to the target individuals reached. Parts of the target groups, of any mixed media campaign, will only have single media contacts. This survey analyzes the long-term advertising effectiveness levels among the readers of magazines, TV viewers and users of the two media. The general findings of the survey, based on a large number of brands from different product fields, give a number of practical leads for optimum planning of mixed media campaigns. It seems to be necessary to optimize mixed media schedules to reach most of the target persons through both communication channels, print as well as TV. One medium enriches the perception of the campaign in the other medium, not only in an additive way but multiply!
In recent times we notice a worldwide trend in media research to move beyond the vehicle contacts towards exposure to the advertising message. This is an easy task in the case of electronic media, if one believes in meter data. With print media we are facing difficulties to measure the exposure to an advertising page, at least if we are looking for large scale readership surveys including many titles, in most cases more than 100. However, there are attempts such as MPX = multiple page exposure or additional qualitative criteria to qualify the exposure to the medium. In Germany this qualitative approval seems to be the most advanced, based on 35 characteristics. The follow-up survey of Yardsticks for Exposure Quality linked the Quality Index with criteria of advertising effectiveness, so that one can show the effect achieved by media planning based on quality indeces. The result is: Media schedules based on exposure with a higher quality lead to steeper and more rapid increases in the effect than with those exposures of a lower quality.
As the title indicates, this paper should throw some light on the practice of readership research and the philosophy behind, worldwide. In a way it is a direct follow-up of the paper given at ESOMAR's last media seminar in Helsinki two years ago. The two papers together will provide a fairly comprehensive overview of what is going on in readership research in the free world. While the first one centred around the theories and models, i.e. Through-the-Book and Recent Reading, this paper concentrates more on the practice.
Through-the-Book and Recent Reading are the current "hot potatoes" in media research and we constantly see them being thrown from hand to hand. The following paper attempts to show the advantages and disadvantages of both TTB and RR. In doing so, we have listed the state of art around the world and went a little into the history. The paper brings out into the open, the arguments put forward by both sides and shows how weak some of them can be. for example, as is the case with TTB, basing future strategies on the historic performances of particular issues leaves a lot of questions un- answered. This seems to be better served by using average issues. But in the case of RR we stumble over problems associated with time and title identity.
PLUS PRINT is the title of an intermedia advertising effectiveness study. It stands for the effectiveness of advertising in electronic media plus additional advertisements in consumer magazines, demonstrated by HORZU, the largest selling magazine in Europe. It answers the question: What happens to fast moving consumer goods, which are exclusively advertised in the electronic media, when they are given additional exposures through print power.
This paper is aimed to throw some light on the ways media research data are, indeed, affecting the media planning processes. Although the media availability in West Germany is entirely different from the availability of media in Canada, the planning processes follow the same patterns on both sides of the Atlantic.