To generate more total weekly reach points, a recency plan uses lower weekly weight and more weeks of advertising than a conventional plan. Reach builds most quickly at lower GRPs, so more weeks at lower weight will generate more weekly reach points than a burst schedule (10).

Drip feeding, the optimal solution for low budget brands, doesn't appear to work in the US. From experience the GRP threshold seems to be 50 to 70 points a week. (Here experience has more weight than research, and the research is substantial.) Below that level marketplace effects are not readable. I believe the problem with drip feeding is insufficient weekly reach. My rule-of-thumb is at least a 35 reach of target during the average week, a 65 reach of target during the average four weeks and an 85 reach of target during the average quarter.

The most obvious concern is that recency planning appears to be an excuse to spend less.

If brands need only a frequency of one, advertisers can cut budgets and that may be a wrong decision.

Recency planning is not a way for advertisers to save money. It recommends cutting weekly weight to add weeks. Since most brands do not run 52 weeks of advertising, recency simply reallocates the current budget. Brands do not spend less; hopefully, they spend more effectively.

Recency planning encourages the bigger budget brands that can afford to buy frequency (eg, McDonalds, Coke, AT&T) to shorten the reach planning period to 104 half-weeks or even 365 days. Why? Because that next purchase occurs each day.

Another objection usually starts with the protest 'But, a car is not a box of frosted flakes!'

Recency planning comes from packaged goods where the empty box signals the need to buy. Surely more frequency is needed for considered purchase.

Every product category has its 'empty box'. The car lease is up, the telephone bill is too high, the dishwasher doesn't work. Each day, for some reason, usually independent of the advertising, people are in the market for products of all sorts. Advertising usually works by influencing that small group of consumers.

And frequency is not eliminated. When John Jones writes '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 it reaches a consumer who is in the market at that time. This continuous series of messages creates frequency - which in a recency model is better thought of as 'presence'. This model applies to cars as well as cereals. (Recency is often ingenuously characterised as saying 'all you need is one exposure' - an obviously extreme and indefensible view.)

A similar itch relates the need for greater frequency to a product's longer purchase interval.

A low level of weekly 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.

Recency planning ignores purchase cycles, because it targets the purchase not the purchaser. The goal is to place a brand message close to a purchase; so as long as there are purchases each week, it doesn't matter how often, or seldom, the average purchaser buys.

There is also the concern that more frequency is needed to be more certain of making the sale.

With all the competing messages and clutter on TV, a single exposure strategy is likely to lose sales.

There is a familiar confusion here. Certainly sales are lost because of too little frequency, but more sales are lost because of no frequency at all. Media planning deals with the allocation of a fixed budget. The question is 'how do I spend the money to make the most sales?' not 'how do I spend the money to ensure making each sale?'.

The evidence shows reaching three consumers once will result in more sales than repeatedly reaching one consumer - and the costs are the same. (Reach wins as long as the shape of the response curve is concave, and there is general agreement that it is.) Remember reach is more cost-effective than frequency, because 'in the market' is more important than additional messages.

Recency planning deals with the question of 'what is the right media weight?' by suggesting too little advertising is insufficient reach, and excess advertising is too much frequency.

Most brands are fighting for share in markets that are not growing, so the effect of recency planning on share of voice is often raised as a concern.

If I choose continuity and my competitor has bursts, won't I be overwhelmed? Won't consumers be influenced more by his advertising because they see more messages?

Yes, but only short term. More weight, weeks one through five, usually means less weight, weeks six through ten. Heavier weight for 30 weeks is exhilarating. Going naked for 20 weeks is draughty. All brands would like to advertise more heavily for more weeks. The problem isn't scheduling, it is budget.

But scheduling need not be a zero-sum game. Since bursts waste money on short-term frequency, getting the competition to burst is an excellent strategy. If you buy reach, while the competition is buying frequency, you're using the dollars better (11).

The last often-raised issue is the importance of frequency to building new brands.

Recency may be fine for established brands, but isn't frequency needed to build new brands?

Recency planning does not eliminate frequency. Frequency is the sum of exposures across weeks. Brand-building is not ignored. It is enhanced by more continuous advertising. Recency's contribution is to focus on the present - the next purchase - whether the brand is new or established, cornflakes or cars. Because if you do not get enough next purchases, you are unlikely to build a brand.

The range of concerns I have listed are typical. They suggest that many media professionals are caught in limbo, unwilling to defend the old ideas and yet uneasy with the new ones. But then revolutions are not about making people comfortable.