The Open Source in Media Knowledge. Decades now, we are trying to find out "How Advertising Works". MediaMedicKit soul purpose is to unlock this mystery.
Exposures... Factors... Recency...
Media Knowledge
20 minutes of reading well spend.
Upcoming Seminars & Events
Changing Lives (Future Foundation)
10 January, 2010
Email: josiew@futurefoundation.net
Web: futurefoundation.net
Executive Leadership Program (AAAA)
11 - 15 January, 2010
Four Seasons Resort, Palm Beach, Florida USA
Now more than ever, advertising agency executives are faced with
critical business issues that significantly impact the success
of both the agency and its employees. The 4A’s Executive
Leadership Program guides participants in developing the skills,
perspectives and confidence necessary to navigate their agencies
through the rough terrain of the current economic environment.
Email: tstarwalt@aaaa.org
Web: aaaa.org
2010 ANA TV & Everything Video Forum (ANA)
11 February, 2010
New York Marriott Marquis, Times Square USA
The ANA TV & Everything Video Forum recognizes that the role of
television in the media mix is being redefined and broadened. In
addition to "traditional" television, the TV & Everything Video
Forum will explore the use of video on any type of screen or
device-the computer/Internet, mobile, point-of-purchase, gaming,
and more.
Email: registration@ana.net
Web: ana.net
IAB Annual Leadership Meeting (IAB)
21 - 23 February, 2010
La Costa Resort, Carlsbad USA
Revenue: The Next Wave, the theme of the IAB Annual Leadership
Meeting in 2010, captures what is foremost in the minds of
industry leaders—how to define the path forward for new media
models to realize the full potential of interactive to drive
substantial revenue. In just two years, the IAB Annual
Leadership meeting has established itself as the central thought
leadership venue for senior executives to discuss and debate
potential solutions to the most pressing challenges facing
marketers, agencies and publishers.
Web: iab.net
Global Healthcare 2010 (ESOMAR)
28 February, 2010 - 2 March, 2010
W New York USA
The Global Healthcare sector has historically been fairly
resilient to recessions, but it is not ‘recession proof’. The
long-term prospects for the sector are good, as strong growth in
emerging markets, an ageing population, and growing levels of
lifestyle-related chronic diseases in the developed world drive
demand. However, the industry dynamics are fundamentally
changing. For instance: the application of Web 2.0 technologies
and new marketing strategies are transforming the world of care
delivery worldwide. The ESOMAR Global Healthcare 2010 conference
focuses on innovation, market trends, and the role of research
as the catalyst of this evolution.
Email: customerservce@esomar.org
Web: esomar.org
Transformation 2010 (AAAA)
28 February, 2010 - 3 March, 2010
Hilton San Francisco Union Square USA
Transformation 2010 is not just the amalgamation of the 4A’s
Media and Leadership Conferences. It’s a unique opportunity to
get everyone—managers, creatives, media, digital,
production—into the same room at the same time to discuss the
pressing matters of the day. Collaborate with and ask questions
of one another. Listen to leaders who have first-hand experience
in transforming their own businesses to meet the emerging needs
of a new era. Be a part of the bigger picture, the solutions to
the time-consuming age-old questions of monetization and
evolution.
Email: tstarwalt@aaaa.org
Web: aaaa.org
Social Media Series: Social Networking World Forum 2010
(Six Degrees)
15 - 16 March, 2010
Olympia, London UK
Two day event with four dedicated conference streams: Social
Networking World Forum, Corporate Social Networking, Social TV
and Mobile Social Networking Forum. Featuring key speakers from
global brands, organisations, social networking publishers and
developers, pioneering social media leaders, top agencies,
content producers plus many more. Also includes joint exhibition
& evening networking reception and full workshop programme
within the exhibition area. Take advantage of a pre-show online
meeting planner for all delegates. Free-to-attend
exhibition-only passes also available.
Email: Natalie@SixDegs.com
Web: socialnetworking-forum.com
2010 Advertising Law & Business Affairs Conference
(ANA)
17 - 18 March, 2010
The Park Hyatt, Washington, DC USA
The advertising industry is facing unprecedented challenges.
Radical new policy initiatives, the most significant since the
Great Depression, will transform the practice of advertising.
Meanwhile, developments in the courts impacting the First
Amendment and new regulatory and self-regulatory initiatives
continue to reshape the legal environment for advertising. In
celebration of ANA's 100th anniversary, our sixth-annual
conference will take place for the first time in Washington, DC
in recognition of the changing environment. These changes will
impact virtually every aspect of advertising activity: from tax
policy to the potential creation of a new mega-agency to oversee
financial advertising and marketing, from the dramatic
enhancement of the FTC's regulatory rulemaking and enforcement
powers to the accelerating efforts to extend and expand existing
regulation to the new media. Join us to hear from leading legal
experts and top representatives from the FTC, FCC, FDA and the
Congress in order to help you navigate this increasingly
turbulent legal and political environment.
Email: registration@ana.net
Web: ana.net
Re:Think 2010: The ARF 56th Annual Convention + Expo (ARF)
22 - 24 March, 2010
Marriott Marquis, New York City USA
Re:think is the seminal research forum of the year where the
entire industry gathers and the latest indispensable knowledge
driving advertising and marketing is discovered, explored and
challenged. The Re:think Expo showcases the latest innovative
market research services and products in one easy-to-navigate
location. Along with high-level networking, free education and
leading-edge industry knowledge resources, the expo is a
must-attend show. ARF’s exclusive knowledge resources will be
featured and demonstrated at the expo.
Web: thearf.org
Research 2010: The Annual Conference (MRS)
23 - 24 March, 2010
Park Plaza Riverbank, London UK
This landmark event, now in its 53rd year, will continue to
bring together the foremost movers and shakers, thinkers and
innovators in research with groundbreaking papers, discussions
and networking. The two-day conference will be chaired once
again by Nick Coates, Research Director at Promise and Simon
Lidington, Chief Exchanger at Insight Exchange. The four major
themes of the conference this year cover society,sectors,
business and techniques. We look forward to seeing you and your
colleagues for what promises to be an exciting, inspiring and
extremely worthwhile event.
Email: james.coyle@mrs.org.uk
Web: research-live.com
Krugman's Three Hit Theory
Below
is what Krugman actually wrote :
"Let me try to explain the special qualities of one, two and three exposures. I stop at three because as you shall see there is no such thing as a fourth exposure psychologically; rather fours, fives, etc., are repeats of the third exposure effect.
"Exposure No. 1 is...a "What is it?" type of... response. Anything new or novel no matter how uninteresting on second exposure has to elicit some response the first time...if only to discard the object as of no further interest...
The second exposure...response...is "What of it?"...whether or not [the message] has personal relevance...
"By the third exposure the viewer knows he's been through his "What is it's?" and "What of it's?," and the third, then, becomes the true reminder . . . The importance of this view . . . is that it positions advertising as powerful only when the viewer...is interested in the [product message]...Secondly, it positions the viewer as...reacting to the commercial--very quickly...when the proper time comes round."
Many in the media world interpreted what Krugman wrote as three media (vehicle) exposures. What Krugman calls "frequency" is not what media planners would call "frequency". Krugman doesn't discuss media frequency at all.
Krugman's three exposures theory is all about psychological exposures.
Joseph W. Ostrow Effective Frequency Factors
Ostrow
(1982) suggests a number of factors that might be used to help
estimate this need. In order to use the framework, the planner
must weight the various factors according to their relevance,
and then rate them according to the degree to which they
characterize the advertising situation.
Marketing factors
Established brands (–)
High market share (–)
Dominant brand in market (–)
High brand loyalty (–)
Long purchase cycle (–)
Product used daily (+)
Heavy spending category (+)
Special targets (+)
Copy factors
Complex copy (+)
Unique copy (–)
New copy (+)
Image type copy (+)
Many kinds of messages (+)
High copy wearout (–)
Small ad units (+)
Media factors
High clutter (+)
Compatible environment (+)
High attentiveness (–)
Pulsed or flighted (+)
Few media used (–)
Repeated ad exposure (–)
Adapted from Joseph W. Ostrow, "Setting Effective Frequency Levels", Effective Frequency: The State of the Art. New York: Advertising Research Foundation, Key Issues Workshop, 1982, pp. 89–102
Media Planning: Recency planning
Want to fluster an advertising agency? Just ask 'How does advertising work?'. It's like asking a platoon of Green Berets to stop shooting and consider the meaning of life. But it is a good question. Why should clients spend money if agencies don't have a sensible theory about how to spend it? And how can advertising people feel good about what we do, if we have no conviction about why we are doing it? Media is no exception. Unless a media plan has its feet planted in what we know about advertising it can be co-opted into a wish list for a bigger budget, or wind-up as a tired cobble of good-old-boy clichés: demographic targeting; reach; impact; 3+ frequency; share-of-voice; media environment; God and country.
Recency planning is not about reach and frequency, or even media. It is about how we think advertising works. It is based on the sensible idea that most advertising works by influencing the brands selected by consumers who are ready to buy. This is not a new idea. John Philip Jones' original title for When Ads Work was 'The Advertising Trigger'. In a remarkably short time - about three years - recency has challenged effective frequency as our advertising planning model in the US. I believe the first public discussion of recency (as 'propinquity') was in 1993 (1). This is mostly due to our changing, more sober view of advertising and the role of the consumer.
Advertising has always had a dark side. Consider that the most quoted appreciation of our business is 'half my dollars are wasted'. Even this faint praise is overblown. The idea that half works is probably nonsense. John Philip Jones comments that 'half working' is, in his experience, 'a gross overestimate of the amount of advertising that has a discernible effect on sales' (2). I certainly agree. After 30 years in the agency business, I can count the unambiguous successes I have witnessed on one hand and still have a finger free.
Perhaps this is the pathology of our trade. We have promoted advertising as a powerful marketing force for growing consumption and brand share, while we know full well it usually is not. Perhaps this helps to explain the anxious nature of our business and its recent decline. Make no mistake: the US has gone through a painful re-evaluation of the 'power' of advertising. We are beginning to realise advertising is a relatively weak marketing force, among the many forces that affect consumers. Its strength is that it can be applied continuously, because it does what it does at a very small cost compared to price promotion, which is the major alternative (3).
PURCHASE TRIGGERS
We have also gone through a re-evaluation of what makes consumers buy. We now appreciate it is events in the consumer's life - the empty cereal box, the high telephone bill, the broken dishwasher, the expiring car lease - that get consumers to consider making a purchase, not the repetition of advertising messages. We now understand that most advertising creates sales by influencing the brand choice of a small group of consumers who are ready to buy. We now think that whether the consumer is in the market is more important than the number of messages he or she receives.
This is a relatively new marketplace phenomenon. People used to look to advertising for information about products to buy. I remember my mother learning about the washing machine from television, continuing a silent dialogue with the commercials for a month and finally buying a Westinghouse. Today my wife knows as much about washing machines as she cares to know. Commercials have no immediate selling effect on her. She'll buy a new one when the old one stops working.
This new view of advertising as a weak, but cost-effective marketing force has greatly improved the quality of media thinking in the US. For example, the old (strong) model says that advertising is important, because it is how consumers learn about brands and become brand buyers. The new (weak) model says most advertising messages are not important to consumers and they don't learn much, because the advertising is usually for products and brands they already know.
The old model regards the consumer as a blank page on which the advertiser writes brand messages. The new model says consumers control the messages by screening out most and selecting only the few that are relevant to them at the time.
The new model accepts that the relevance that makes ads work is provided by what is happening in the consumer's life and seldom by the advertising.
The new model understands that advertising messages work through the chance encounter with a ready consumer.
To understand the pivotal role of recency in this revolution, we need to return to John Philip Jones. His widely circulated analysis of Nielsen panel data shows a single exposure can strongly influence which brand is purchased. This has been confirmed independently by the work of Larry Gibson (4), Gary Schroeder (5) and Colin McDonald (6). Jones' analysis had destroyed our confidence in effective frequency planning, but it seemed to conflict with the weak theory of advertising. If advertising is a weak force, how can a single ad message produce a strong effect? The key is 'recency', the insight that advertising messages work mostly with the few consumers who are in the market at the time. Weak effects in the aggregate market are not inconsistent with strong effects on individual consumers. (I believe recency's most important contribution to advertising practice is the notion that advertising effects occur in the short term or not at all. This means we should be able to tell whether a campaign is working - or not working - before we spend real money.)
Recency planning uses this new thinking, starting with the idea that when is more important than how many. If whether a consumer is in the market is the critical variable, then advertising effects are controlled by when the message is received.
'There is a window of advertising opportunity preceding each purchase. Advertising's job is to influence the purchase. Media planning's job is to place the message in that window' (7).
When recency is applied to media planning, the first casualty is effective frequency. Jones' analysis shows 'A single exposure in the seven days before purchase has far greater effect that what is added by further exposures' (8). In media terms, a single exposure is reach and further exposures are frequency, so Jones' data say that during the average week of a campaign, reach is far more cost-effective than frequency (9).
Reach is also far more necessary. Since purchases are made each week and planners do not know who will make them, the media goal is to reach as many different consumers as possible in as many different weeks as possible in order to reach the few that are in the market at any time. The strategy is to cycle through the market at the lowest cost and maximise total weekly, total four-weekly and total quarterly target reach points across the year. It is a short- and longer-term reach strategy.
RECENCY ABHORS BURSTS
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.
Recency planning is rapidly gaining support in the US, because it is mostly commonsense. (The debate 'recency versus effective frequency' is over. The issue now is how to implement recency. Although usually tight-lipped about it, major US advertisers such as Proctor & Gamble, Colgate and Kraft are leading the way.) But the ideas are revolutionary: plan for reach not frequency, continuity not bursts; use a one-week not four-week planning period; shop for lowest cost-per-reach-point not just lowest CPT; use dispersion (low ratings), not concentration (high ratings). Revolutions invite reactions. The balance of this paper explores the common objections to recency planning appearing in the US advertising press.OBJECTIONS TO RECENCY
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.)
TARGETING THE PURCHASE
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.
Erwin Ephron
Erwin Ephron is a partner at Ephron, Papazian & Ephron Inc., a Manhattan-based consulting group. He is a past president of both the Media Directors Council and the Agency Media Research Directors Council, a founder of the Media School and an active member of the Advertising Research Foundation. Before founding EP&E, Erwin spent 25 years in agency media and research, including ten years at the head of his own agency.