The authors recently analyzed the local delivery of national television schedules in concert with proposed purchases of spot radio weight on a Designated Market Area basis. The purpose of the analysis was to determine the optimal combination of network TV and spot radio required to meet the local sales goals for selected marketers in given media planning situations. This macro approach to optimization provides a disciplined framework for focusing on both local market opportunity and optimal reach and frequency. The following paper briefly outlines the impact that advertising clutter and ad cost escalation are having on commercial effectiveness in the United States. It then outlines the sales allocation optimization findings and highlights how the combined radio-TV media mixes performed on a reach and efficiency basis relative to total schedule delivery in the United States.
When considering the long-term effects of advertising, Internet advertisements can only be seen as part of an integrated media mix, re-enforcing messages that have become ingrained in memory. But the Net is an immediate medium and short-term effects can be measured. Assessing the effectiveness of advertising on the Net, should be part of the measurement of the whole communication mix.
The media planning process traditionally uses data on media habits of a target group defined in terms of broad demographic variables to make decisions about the media mix and specific vehicles that are relevant to a brand. Media mix decisions are generally based on considerations of exposure and cost efficiency of different media in a demographically defined target group. However, it is our hypothesis that the very pattern of media consumption itself has a relationship with product consumption, and that the media mix selected and the objectives set for each medium in a brand plan should be based on an understanding of what media mix the core target audience consumes. For example, where the considerations of cost efficiency and exposure dictate the sole use of television, it may be possible that the group with the largest propensity to consume ( the product in question) are heavy consumers of press and moderate consumers of television. In such a case, clearly, there is an opportunity to attain greater effectiveness by the use of press in conjunction with television.
The idea that a combination of print and television makes an advertising budget work harder than does television on its own has been well supported by a number of research studies in recent years. These research studies were drawn together under the auspices of FIPP in 1991 and published in a brochure titled The Media Multiplier: Increasing Sales Worldwide. This brochure has now been translated into 11 languages and has been widely circulated throughout the world. The benefit from mixed print and television advertising arises in two ways - from a) better targeting, that is spreading the advertising effort more evenly, especially against those people most likely to respond positively, and from b) an increase in the power of the communication achieved by the media mix. This paper briefly outlines these two factors, presents the limited information currently available on their relative importance and considers what further information is required to throw more light on this balance. It concludes with the suggestion that the findings of this further work could have very considerable implications for both the media selling strategies of publishers and the development of advertising and media research.
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.
Changes within the UK Television market, both recent and imminent, will bring the buying and selling of TV airtime moving much closer to the negotiation of Press space. The separate selling of Channel 4 airtime, the continuing growth of satellite penetration, the fragmentation of viewing and increased emphasis on coverage as well as cost will all put greater emphasis on research. Against this background, in 1990 BMRB (the owners of TGI) embarked upon the significant commercial undertaking of fusing TGI onto BARB to create Target Group Ratings (TGR). The objective was to create an extended and enhanced TV measurement currency capable of enabling TV sales contractors and airtime buyers to assess audience delivery by brand and product users rather than just normal demographics. The paper summarises the methodology, and demonstrates just some of the strengths and value that TGR data can provide to its users. The paper also highlights some of the BARB changes, the implications the changes may have on the fusion process and assesses the early comparisons of the fused data to BARB single source data.
In the past our Company was part of the international network of publishers experimenting the Multiplying the Media Effect Research Programme. In Italy, as with all the countries where these experiments were carried out, the results substantially confirmed the enormous increase in the efficacy of communication when the Periodical Press is added to a planned use of Commercial TV. From these Research Programmes the multiplying effect has appeared so relevant that now Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, which in the meantime has become part of the Multinational and Multimedia Fininvest Group, is concentrating more on the extraordinary increase in communicative effectiveness resulting from this Multiplier effect than on the traditional competition between the two media Commercial TV and Periodical Press.
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.
In September 1989 a short but heavy multimedia campaign was started to increase the knowledge in the Netherlands of the new tax laws that will influence everybody's life as from the first of January 1990. A small brochure was inserted in all TV guides during one week. Small newspaper ads were announcing this brochure for the next week tv magazine. During that week special television spots were pointing out the new tax laws for next year and that useful information could be found in this weeks televison magazine. This offered the opportunity for the researchers of the group of publishers of tv-guides, the media buying company Media Matters, and AGB-Intomart to use this multi media campaign as a real-life experiment. The purpose was to test if synergy between the three different media types occurred and if there were any multimedia effects on the main goals of the campaign: to increase the intensity of reading of the brochure and to increase the knowledge of the relevant target group on some crucial aspects of the new tax laws. The research was carried out during two weeks by means of 8 daily telephone interviewing waves of between 125 and 170 individuals each. In total 1166 individuals were interviewed. The analyses were carried out with help of multiple regression techniques to show the different influences and interactions from a number of relevant variables on the selected dependent variables: reading intensity of the brochure and level of knowledge on the new tax laws.
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!