Abstract:

This paper identifies the planning/selling situations where radio contributes substantially to the media mix. 'Real' unified cross-media information from Arbitron's Portable People Meter (PPM) data provide the input and Stone House Systems' analytics provide the optimization and duplication estimates. The output points to opportunities where radio can powerfully complement television to reach specific targets with a variety of communications plans. Results from Philadelphia (United States) show that radio can contribute over 20% of unique share to total reach over a range of targets and plan levels, both for condensed, simpler media plans and for diverse/dispersed plans. This paper also shows that disparate databases and random estimation are no substitute for the real thing: near-passive, 'real' cross-media information such as that provided by the Portable People Meter.