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media works best
New study gauging results by product category
By Kevin Downey
If there’s one perennial challenge media planners and buyers face in placing more than $175 billion in advertising in the U.S. each year, it’s determining which media vehicles will most effectively get their clients' advertising messages across to consumers.
It continues to be enormously difficult, despite recent advances in media measurement.
The data available to figure it out has changed little over the years, and as a result planning and buying are still very much a reactive business in which projected purchasing behavior and media usage are based on historical trends.
But that may change with a new tool for media people to use alongside their traditional ones.
A study is being developed by Ed Papazian, president and chief executive officer of Media Dynamics, that is intended to predict which advertising categories a media vehicle’s audience will be most receptive to.
"The core idea is that marketers, through their media people, are targeting media by demographics or in some cases by product usage," says Papazian.
"That’s not really going deep enough because you can’t assume that because a person is a buyer of a car or a certain kind of food that he or she will be receptive to your ads."
The study will gauge which ads consumers will be most responsive to and, by extension, through which media they will be most receptive to those messages.
"What we’re in effect saying is that a certain TV audience, over and above everything you know about it, is more or less receptive to the advertising for your category."
The first set of data from this study, which does not yet have a name but is known as the Advertising Receptivity Study, is expected sometime in early summer.
Papazian says the study is being done in the field with 1,000 people receiving surveys by mail. The frequency and depth of future studies will depend on response to this pilot study.
A number of media companies, including ABC, CBS, the Discovery Networks, and media agencies, including Starcom MediaVest Group and Carat, have signed on as subscribers.
"The receptivity study is much more along the lines of what we want," says Ed Gaffney, senior vice president and director of knowledge and information at Carat.
"We believe that the media you put an ad in are just as important as the ad and believe there needs to be a mindset fit. The receptivity study will give us a much better idea of which media we should be in."
Ultimately, the receptivity study will be used to complement existing research, like Nielsen television ratings, the MRI magazine readership study, and even measurement tools in development, such as Arbitron's Portable People Meter, which is being tested in Philadelphia as a mostly passive system to measure all broadcast media.
"It would be used in that area after you have your targeting done, when you start looking at how the target uses media," says Gaffney.
"It would be an additional filter there and would be used in addition to everything else we use."
March 5, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.
