A Tale of a Tailored Campaign
How quality is key when it comes to maximising your TV impact
Historically both Media Agencies and Media Auditing firms have focused on the cost effectiveness of media advertising. This was because actual advertising opportunities once varied very little, so the differentiator was cost.
Today, however, the differentiator is quality. Agencies once bought bundles of advertising from Media firms in TV, radio and newspaper, and sold them on to their clients. This is slowly being replaced by a more tailored experience—but many haven’t realised that this change is happening.
Reaching the right number of possible customers in the right demographic, as cheaply as possible, is a common advertising KPI. Doing this through bundled advertisement slots is hard—and expensive. You may end up spending large amounts of money advertising to the wrong demographic or, worse still, with placements delivering very low viewership.
“Spot on” KPIs are the first step
Fredrik Kinge, CEO of ECI Media Management tells of one case, where a client was still paying an Agency a flat fee and, in return, the agency was providing them with a cost-focused campaign made up of bundled advertising. The firm’s then-auditor had bought into this “streamlined” approach—even though it was ultimately more expensive and less effective than a more tailored approach.
ECI stepped in, and started by replacing the flat fee structure with a performance-based approach.
“We then made sure to focus on quality and not only cost,” says Kinge. ECI helped the client derive Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that were linked directly to the aims of the campaign. ECI defined these KPIs in terms of quality-driven metrics. These included campaign control, targeting effectiveness and coverage productivity as the ultimate KPIs, ie the number of potential customers a campaign actually reached, and set targets for how many potential customers they actually wanted to reach.
Toward a quality-focused strategy
Kinge points out that the combination of the performance-based fee and the specific KPIs changed the Agency’s behaviour: “the optimization was geared towards more control of spot placements, more analysis of the programmes being bought, and, overall, a reduction in wasted buying.” The Agency had begun to search for exactly the right combination of TV programme placements to fit the client´s KPIs.
This quality-focused strategy not only meant that the advertiser maximised its impact, but it also did so at a lower cost. Overall, the new campaign cost 10 percent less when it came to price per GRP, and was 20 percent more effective when looked at from the perspective of coverage. Moreover, there was less wasted advertising, more awareness of the brand and, most importantly, the brand’s sales went up.
Gross Rating Point. A standard measure for impact in advertising; it measures the percentage of the target market reached, multiplied by the average number of exposures to the advertisement.
