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The names are as they come into my head. There is no particular mean-
ing to the order. Herb Krugman, Gale Metzger, John Philip Jones, Gus Prie-
mer, the Pauls, Gerhold and Chook, Jon Nesvig, Chuck Fruit, Stanley
Federman, Peter Knobloch, Ed Papazian, Frank Harrison, Seymour Banks,
Andrew Ehrenberg, Charlie Ramond, Colin McDonald, Roderick White, Jon
Swallen, Roz Arnstein, Roger Baron, Rick Gordon, Samuel Johnson, Elaine,
Taffy and others I will no doubt remember as soon as this is printed.
Erwin Ephron
September 2002
CONTENTS
www.EphronOnMedia.com
I picked these seven for their effect on how we plan advertising today
and probably in the future. I may be wrong.
RECENCY PLANNING
It's not about Reach or Frequency. It's About
How Ads Work in Mature Consumer Markets.
____________________
Advertising in the US has a persistent dark Side. Its most celebrated slo-
gan is "half the dollars are wasted." Only the twist "but, we don’t know
which half," dulls the edge and lets us smile, because It suggests the sim-
ple problem is to fix the half that doesn’t
work. Nonsense.
Europe has a more comfortable view of what advertising can do. Its lead-
ing spokesman, Andrew Ehrenberg, explains that advertising is a rela-
tively weak, essentially defensive force among the many forces that drive
mature consumer markets. Jones suggests advertising’s strength is that it
can be applied continuously, because it does what it does at a very small
cost compared to the major alternative, which is price promotion.
With these new ideas in the air, there is an uneasy revolution in pack-
aged-goods advertising. Recency is gradually replacing effective fre-
quency as the planning model.
A Single Exposure Is
Reach, More Exposures
Are Frequency.
John Jones’ basic analysis shows a single exposure in the 7 days before
purchase has a far greater effect than what is added by more exposures.
This is a new idea. Ready to buy is more important than number of messages.
That makes the planner’s assignment “buy weekly reach.”
We don’t know where the window is for each consumer (i.e., who is
ready to purchase). But purchases are made each week. So, advertising
should try to reach as many new target consumers as possible in as many
weeks as possible. A pure reach strategy! Plan and buy for continuous
short-term reach. Try not to waste money on short-term repetition.
1A single exposure can work only because it is the last of series of brand mes-
sages consumers see. It is effective this time because that consumer is now in the
market.
Many advertisers argue that advertising for a car is not like advertising
for a box of cereal. A single exposure may work for corn flakes where the
empty box signals the need to purchase, but considered purchase adver-
tising often has to sell the idea of buying the product as well as the par-
ticular brand.
I believe Recency planning applies equally well to both cars and corn
flakes.
And in either case, one exposure does not do all the work. When John
Jones finds "a single exposure close to purchase can trigger a response,"
this is not the first exposure, but the most recent in a series of exposures.
It is effective because the consumer is in the market. That model applies
to cars as well as frosted-flakes.
A similar concern ties the need for frequency to a product’s purchase in-
terval. The argument goes, low frequency might be right for a product that is
purchased every week or so, but not for a product that is purchased every four or
five years.
And also the cost of talking to 994 other potential customers who may be in the
market next week!
True, most of them will never buy the car, but those messages are not
wasted either. They help to create the broad-market perception that Mer-
cedes is special, which makes owning one so attractive to the small group
of consumers who have the money.2
A Recency plan does not spend less money. It reduces weekly weight to
add more weeks of advertising. Since most brands aren’t running 52
weeks of advertising now, Recency simply reallocates the current budget.
Brands do not spend less, they spend more effectively.
Recency planning encourages the big budget brands that can afford to
buy frequency (e.g., McDonald’s, Coke, AT&T) to shorten the reach plan-
ning period to 104 half-weeks or even 365 days. Why? Because the next
sale is always about to happen.
The answer is "Yes," but only short-term. The problem with flighting is
more weight, weeks one through five, usually means less weight, weeks
six through 10. Heavier-weight for 30 weeks is exhilarating. Going naked
for 20 weeks is chilly.
All brands would like to advertise more heavily for more weeks. The
problem isn’t scheduling, it’s budget. Recency planning deals with the
question of "what is the right media weight," by suggesting too little adver-
tising is too low a weekly reach and excess advertising is too high a
weekly frequency.
But, scheduling need not be a zero sum game. Since flighting wastes
money on short-term frequency, continuity is a winning strategy. If you
buy reach, while the competition is buying frequency, you’re using the
dollars more effectively.
Certainly sales are lost because of too little frequency, but more sales are
lost because of no frequency at all. The Jones frequency response curve
shows reach is more cost-effective than frequency. Reaching three con-
sumers, once, will generate more purchases than reaching one consumer
three times.
Because if you don’t get enough next purchases, building a brand doesn’t
matter.
MEDIA-MIX
The New Media Planning is About Picking
Combinations of Media.
____________________
The brain takes comfort in simple sorting –- I like apples better than oranges.
It is less relaxed with conditional complexity –- But, if I’ve already eaten an
apple, then I’d like an orange.
The old media planning was about picking individual media. The new
media planning is about picking combinations of media (and permuta-
tions of media, where sequence of exposure is important). This increases
relevant media choice from a manageable few hundred to an unruly few
hundred thousand. It also means comparing apples with oranges. Both
tasks are well beyond the abilities of a planner with a notepad.
These same forces are active in pushing media-mix, but the obvious de-
cline of television is the whip. In the face of strong demand and shrinking
inventories, the networks have raised prices and added commercials.
Both make television less effective. Advertisers know this and are seeking
options. The move from TV is not rampant, but it is inevitable, and that is
spurring agency interest in better media-mix planning data and optimiza-
tion.
There are also the under-explored benefits of focus and synergies. Some
media may just communicate better to some consumers (reading people
versus viewing people) and mixed exposures may have a greater summed
effect (sell the car on the TV and the deal in the paper).
These are the arts of media-mix. The science is knowing which medium
to add and when to add it. CPM alone offers no guidance, CPM and
reach-build together do. This is the routine stuff of optimization.
A database with these qualities does not exist and creating one is a bear.
The simplest approach is to use the currency for ratings and within-
medium duplication, and calculate the across-media duplication rates
from a single-source study like MRI or Simmons. The weakness of this
approach is the MRI and Simmons recall measurements of television do
not track with NTI meter measurements of television. As a result, the du-
plication with television data will be poor.
Data fusion
Fusion is not just theory. It is currently used in the UK, Japan, Latin
America and Europe. For years, US media researchers have been told that
fusing together surveys designed to measure specific media may be pref-
erable to using a single survey that measures them all.
As of this writing, you pays your money and takes your choice. There
will probably be both an MRI-based single source optimizer (offered by
1 Actually the first US example was the MARS Pharmaceutical Readership study
fused with the Nielsen TV Index database (2002).
In practice, the five weightings can be compacted into two groups: Expo-
sure, commercial and communication weights, which equalize the different
measures of audience, and frequency and synergy weights, which establish
the value of reach and repetition.
Even the media packaging part can be a problem. Often IM groups do not
have access to the very media assets they are supposed to be integrating.
Their toughest sell is internal. Multi-division programs that bring dollars
to the corporation are often at odds with single division goals. These can
be as basic as revenues, commission dollars and inventory control.
Unless the integrated marketing group has a mandate from above, it dif-
ficult for them to put together a substantial program. Few have this back-
ing. Today’s integrated marketing programs are captained by Turner and
ABC, not AOL/Time Warner and Disney.
These are not buy more, pay less propositions. None of the groups suggest
there are discounts. That would be media packaging. Integrated Market-
ing charges more by suggesting the value of the Sum is greater than the
cost of the Parts -- and indeed it must be for most of these deals to make
sense to the advertiser. The first thing a responsible agency does is decon-
struct the package to see if the individual pieces can be bought for less
elsewhere. And often they can.
For integrated marketing to be worth the money, the value of the media
exposures (which are usually the highest cost element in the package)
needs to be heightened by the strength of the marketing concept. That
does not often happen. "Complete brand solutions" (a CBS Plus phrase)
are difficult to craft. They are created with ideas, not just media, and Inte-
grated Marketing as currently practiced is long on media and short on
ideas.
Integrated marketing
programs add value
with ideas.
An authentic integrated marketing program is creative. It sifts through a
mosaic of possibilities to shape marketing opportunities that leverage the
brand’s persona. It adds value with ideas, as well as media assets. It is a
creative-cum-media package. Media sellers are not good at creative.
So despite the client meetings to discuss goals and the client meetings to
plan strategies, most Integrated Media proposals are just media. Value-
added packages designed to sell network television at a higher price.
Which brings us back to media basics.
- November 1, 2000 -
Originally published in Myers Mediaenomics Report
But it’s hard to have big brands without big media, and that need for big
media’s reach in the face of TV fragmentation, has pushed advertisers
towards media-mix.
Single-source
But the brass ring of media-mix information isn’t data integration, it’s
“single source,” a study accurately measuring many media and product-
use in a single national sample. The single-source studies we currently
use are a shadow of that promise. The glaring problem is the television
recall measurement they are forced to use.
Data fusion
The fusion concept is simple. Database A is the magazine readership sur-
vey. Database B is the TV peoplemeter panel. Database A is ‘married’ to
Database B at the respondent level by ascribing the survey-measured be-
havior of its respondents to matched peoplemeter panel members.
When this is done, the fused peoplemeter database acts as if its respon-
dents had participated in the print survey and answered the magazine
reading and product use questions.
But that usual question “how good is a fusion?” is the wrong question.
We should be asking “is using fusion better than what we are currently
doing?” Fusion works on the same statistical assumptions as when we
target Women 18-49 for shampoo commercials because, per-capita, that
group uses more shampoo. But the fusion match, ascribing shampoo use
to TV viewers is likely to be better because it uses more variables.
1Today’s TV/Print fusions are limited by the absence of readership data in the
TV database, but TV viewing data is usually collected in both.
In the fusion, individual respondent records from MARS are joined to the
individual respondent records of the Nielsen Peoplemeter panel based
upon characteristics the respondents have in common. The links include
age, sex, a number of household variables, geography, cable/non-cable
and volume of TV viewing.
TV planning and buying have always relied upon simple demo matching
to target potential buyers. This takes the prominent user age/sex demo-
graphic as reported by User Survey A and selects programs attracting
viewers in that demo from TV Survey B .The problem with this approach
is age/sex targets seldom define consumer markets. More often they just
show concentration of buyers. This results in
“targeting error” of two kinds.
of adults over 35 suffer from acid reflux. That means that 81 percent of the
dollars spent targeting Adults 35+ are wasted.2
TABLE 1
X*pert TV Optimization.
Adults 35+ versus Acid Reflux Sufferers
65 Reach Goal.
X*Pert shows a 65 reach of Adults 35+ requires 146 target points. The
fused database shows that schedule generates 153 GRP’s against Acid Re-
flux Sufferers and delivers a 67 reach. The higher numbers signal that tar-
geting the demo results in buying too much television.
To reach 65 percent of Acid Reflux Sufferers requires only 143 target points
distributed differently. This reduces the cost of a 65 reach from
$3,227,699 to $2,816,094, a saving of 13 percent. So in this case it seems
possible to buy a TV reach goal for less by using the ailment in place of
the demographic.
Sinus Sufferers
Another example. This comparison is between Adult Sinus Headache Suf-
ferers and Adults 18-49, the corresponding demo target (Table 2).
TABLE 2
X*pert TV Optimization.
Adults 18-to-49 Versus Sinus Headache Sufferers
65 Reach Goal.
Optimized on Optimized on
(translated
DAY PART Adults 35+ Sinus Sufferers
to Sinus Sufferers)
GRP’s GRP’s
Net A Prime Sitcoms 8.3 8.0 0
Net B Prime Sitcoms 11.3 11.9 19.2
Prime Law/Crime 26.0 34.9 33.7
Other Sitcoms 20.6 17.3 13.8
Cable Comedy 3.2 3.4 9.2
Cable Movies 28.5 23.8 12.9
Cable Selective 13.1 12.6 19.2
Cable News 10.0 7.6 8.2
Network Sports 20.6 24.0 10.1
Other 48.1 71.4 24.1
Total TRP’s 165.6 189.9 150.4
Reach 65 70 65
Total Dollars $3,880,229 _ $2,959,056
X*Pert shows a 65 reach of Adults 18-49 requires 166 target points. But
this is overkill for Sinus Sufferers. The fused database shows it generates
190 Sinus Sufferer GRP’s, many more than needed which takes the plan
above the 65 reach goal to a 70.
Both examples suggest it is possible to buy TV target reach for less using
fused ailment data in place of demographics. The open question is “why
does this happen?” Should we be convinced by these results?
The same pattern holds for a large number of ailments like backache, de-
pression, insomnia and obesity, where the sufferer is perhaps less active
than his or her demo counterpart because of the ailment itself (Table 3).
TABLE 3
TV Viewing Rates
Ailment versus TV Planning Demo
MARS 2002
One suspects that tighter targeting through fusion could help a wider
range of advertised products. Especially those where use correlates with
more or less TV viewing.
Conclusion
Up to now the industry has focused on the
value of fusion in estimating cross-media du-
plication for media-mix reach planning and
optimization. An equally important use of
fusion is in targeting television.
3 There will certainly be cases where the user group views less than the surro-
gate demo and requires more dollars than the plan assumes.
"Optimization" is from the Latin. It means, "to make best or most favor-
able." Super Midas, on the other hand, is from the Greek. At least the Mi-
das part is. Super sounds like advertising. Midas is a remarkable name for
a media optimizer, because it frames the problem perfectly.
So we might ask of the perfect optimizer "Take this $10 million media budget
and spend it in a way that will ultimately produce the most sales for my brand."
But the perfect optimizer—not being stupid—might ask back, "Okay, but
first you need to tell me how advertising works to produce sales so that I may
translate that goal into a media strategy for achieving it." And that is where
we need to start.
The goals might be a >35 weekly reach, a >65 4-week reach, a >80 13-
week reach. The selection criteria for plans achieving these goals are the
highest total of weekly, 4-week, 13-week week target reach points.
All media price on qualities which are independent of audience size, for
example objective characteristics like the "sight, sound and motion" of TV.
These non-media attributes are often more important than audience in
selecting media types. They are one reason why TV dollars do not shift to
other media in spite of rising TV costs.
There are also softer qualities like "involvement" — which can be "sort-of
measured" and used to differentiate vehicles within television. These are
often called "halo" qualities because the case is made that they carry-over
from the program to the commercial and increase its effectiveness.
Program Liking
An intuitively appealing halo quality is "program liking." The classic study
of Lloyd and Clancy (1991) and the more recent analysis by David Pol-
This work is suggestive, but far from convincing and has had little influ-
ence on TV planning or buying. One important reason is the presumed
carry-over effects of program environment hit the brick-wall of schedul-
ing practice — the "podding" of TV commercials. With close to eight se-
quential spots-per-break, the lead-in to a commercial is most often another
commercial.
Dial-switching
In the late 1980's the television networks offered dial-switching as a behav-
ioral surrogate for probability of commercial exposure. The reasoning was
dial-switchers are less involved in the program tuned and less involved
viewers are less likely to see the commercial.
Early morning TV, which functions like radio for many of us, has one of
the lowest dial-switching rates in television. For these, and other reasons,
dial-switching data has not has an important role in TV planning.
For example, SMART data shows (or suggests) the following illustrative
patterns:
Solitary viewing gets greater than average attention. Daytime viewing with a
child present gets lower than average attention. Early morning co-viewing to a
talk program on a kitchen set with a child present gets far lower than average
attention.
EXHIBIT A
MODELING "PROBABILITY OF SEEING A
MESSAGE" FROM RESPONDENT-LEVEL DATA
Percent discount or premium applied to viewing. Weights are additive.
Instance 1.
Calculation: Daypart/ program -20, rating level (0), Clutter -10 Weighted ex-
posure value 1.0-.30 + 0.70
Low value: Kitchen set with husband and child present in the room. Exposure
factor 0.30.
Calculation: Daypart (-20), child present (-20), kitchen set (-20), rating level
(0). Clutter -.10 Weighted exposure value 1.0-.70 = .30
___________________
Instance 2.
Calculation:Daypart (0), Comedy (-2), family room (0), other viewers (0), rat-
ing (+5). Weighted value 1.0 + .03 = 1.03
Calculation: Daypart (0), Comedy (-2), kitchen (-20), 2 adults (-10), rating
(+5). Weighted value 1.0 - .27 = 0.73
___________________
Instance 3.
Calculation: Daypart (-15), Kitchen set (-20), alone (0). Weighted value 1.0-.35
= 0 .65. Same exposure, Family set = .85)
___________________
The exposure-weighted audience for each spot would be the sum of the
projections of the attention-weighted respondent exposures — expressed
as a rating and projected as a whole number for CPMs. Reach calculations
would use the attention-weighted probabilities.
I am not arguing for the precise numeric values, which are largely un-
supported, but rather for the idea of using respondent-level attention
weighting, based upon circumstance of viewing combined with better
attention level research to provide the weightings for reach optimization.
Because unless we can solve the Midas Problem, we will surely be optimiz-
ing the wrong thing.
Enactment
Optimization forces attention to another issue — what I call Enactment —
the translation of a computer solution into an actual brand schedule appearing
on television. With optimization, enactment is hyper-critical, because in-
cremental-reach-point planning — the stuff of optimization — requires
specific spots to run in specific weeks. The tolerance for substitution or
delay is far smaller than in traditional gross-target-point planning where
any of a wide array of spots will do and there is an average 4-week reach
window. With weekly reach optimization, liberties in execution will per-
ceptibly reduce weekly reach, losing much of what optimization pro-
grams have been introduced to achieve.
For example, a 40 reach-points a week schedule (80 TRP) has far less
value delivered as 40 TRPs week one, 50 TRPs week two, 150 points week
three. Weeks one and two do not achieve the 40 reach goal, week three
wastes 70 points on excess frequency.
Learning
Optimization programs are not new. They followed the introduction of
the computer into agency operations. In the late 1960's BBDO introduced
Linear Programming. In the 1970's Compton had Compass, Y&R, the High
Assay Model and MIT’s Lodish and Little developed Mediac.
This second age of optimization is different. It has both the Pentium Proc-
essor and an urgency born of fragmentation. We need an optimizer to
help us buy TV today, because we have so many TV options that just sort-
ing through the inventory is beyond our current systems. And history
will repeat itself.
- February 9, 1998 -
Originally published in Ad Age
• We plan TV for reach. Magazines for continuity. A cheap way to fill-in the
spaces between flights of TV.
• We show R&F’s for the total schedule not the average week, even though we
know there is a significant difference.
The new Recency planning reveals the weakness of print plans. Recency
says advertising works mostly with consumers who are ready-to-buy.
This focuses us on running enough TV weight each week to build signifi-
cant levels of reach each week. There is a minimum weight threshold in
TV -- about 60-80 target points.
Print at TV weight
produces response.
The few recent cases where print was used at TV weight-levels in the US
are tantalizing. In 1991 Family Circle tracked magazine and product pur-
chase using the CitiCorp consumer scanner panel, showed magazine ad-
vertising can immediately increase short term sales.
It also demonstrates the importance of higher TRP levels. Since the "test"
ads were exposed in actual magazine schedules running in several
women's magazines—and the Family Circle purchaser is a heavy maga-
zine reader—the Family Circle purchaser households, (the test group in
which brand purchase was measured), received considerably more print
advertising weight than the brand plan called for.
The research design had the effect of tripling the print weight received by
the test group to TV weight-levels.
It worked.
• Duncan Hines Frosting, for example. Sales were up 29 per cent as a result of
print advertising. The brand ran 94 W18+TRP’s in Family Circle, but the
test group women actually received closer to 262 points when other maga-
zines carrying the campaign were included in the analysis. Those are TV
weight-levels.
• Nabisco Harvest Crisps. Sales were up 39 per cent as a result of print adver-
tising. Test group women received 225 TRPs over a few weeks.
Fifteen test brands showed sales increases as the result of print advertis-
ing. The average test-group print weight was 185 TRPs a month. That is
equal to a light, but acceptable, television schedule.
TEACHING TAP
TO THE ELEPHANT
Media Planners Have Fewer Options
Than They Think.
____________________
A Response Function
Frequency Response Total
Group Value Value
1 0.25 0.25
2 0.60 0.85
3 0.10 0.95
4+ 0.05 1.00
In this example the first exposure has a value of 0.25, the second has a
value of 0.60, the third has a value of 0.10 and additional exposures, past
three, have little value. Translated into media terms, this response func-
tion calls for a weekly frequency of two (shaded), because that is the fre-
quency group with the highest value. In fact, a frequency of two is
usually the recommended level in what we call “effective frequency”
planning.
The dominance of heavy viewers also means the familiar formula Reach x
Frequency equals GRP’s is terribly misleading. It suggests Reach/ Fre-
As Scotty might say to Picard. “Sorry Captain. The old girl just can’t tap.”
- August 1, 2001 -