Media Planning 5

Media Planning - Rev. 2002
(Part 5 of 5)

This is the final installment in a five-part series devoted to new best practices in US strategic media planning, which began in June 2001. The work was presented at a European Media Conference and the School of Economics in Stockholm on October 2.

Point #6: Cross Platforms issues

Cross Platform deals are becoming more fashionable. With AOR assignments more prevalent and globalization of client assignments making more and more sense, it also makes sense to look at media opportunities that exist at discounted rates within large media complexes like AOL/Time Warner, Viacom, etc. What happens is an agency buys some television, maybe some radio, product placement in movies, theme park exhibits, sports sponsorship, concert events and perhaps some outdoor signage all from the same umbrella corporation, for a break on price.

This sounds like it makes sense, but there are two obstacles to overcome. First, are the properties that are being offered the kinds of media vehicles you would have chosen anyway, because of their quality? If the answer is no, you must decide to compromise in order to proceed. The second question relates to the medium's internal problem of crossing division lines in order to make the corporate cross platform sale. Sometimes, divisions can be very protective about their properties and do not want to give them away at a discount.

Another type of cross platform buy relates to the client, not the medium. It takes two complementary clients and puts them together. Say a movie company and an automotive manufacturer. Traditionally, studios lock up prime television programs far in advance of their airing, because they need to advertise opening weekend in grand fashion on the "best shows". Then the release date for a movie gets moved by one week and the network is asked to take the show back and yield another set of premium programs at the last minute. This scenario has a partner automotive company picking up the first weekend properties, which represents the weekend of the delayed movie opening and trade premium shows from the next weekend in return. Here the traps relate to pricing issues, since studios pay top dollar.

Point #7 Audits and auctions

Next, there is the buyer seller issue of how media buys get audited, how they are bookkept and how they are sold. A few attempts have been made to sell remnant space and time at an Internet auction site. Up to now, this has met with only minor success. A congress of Interpublic, WPP and Omnicom people have come together to form Mediaport, a company that would do all the backroom work on television buys. A natural extension of this idea would be to transform it into a master auction site for the networks to display their avails and all buyers would be able to enter the site to bid. This completely alters the way time as been bought for fifty years. The auction site phase is not likely to be immediately acceptable, but once the backroom functions are working, we will probably see a revolution here.

Point #8: Muscling in on muscle

Of course, the muscle medium is television and it is about to get another workout. For the last five years, make that ten, we have been hearing about the synthesis of television and the computer. The Internet on TV, intelligent television? It is overdue and underdone.

TIVO might just be the forerunner of the whole phenomenon. It represents intelligent television. TV that can search and store, act as its own guide, tape programs by viewer predilection, TV with more commercials and perhaps a different kind, that is if they are not programmed out by technology.

Television has never really recovered from the existing criticism regarding commercial clutter and competitive commercial adjacencies. Of course in order to get rid of the clutter, today's advertiser would have to pay higher prices to make up for the lost income of commercials cut from the schedule, It is very unlikely that will happen. However, if Internet and television commercials coexist side by side, pricing and effectiveness would surely change dramatically.

Point #9: LTAs/Nothing lasts forever

While it is true that nothing lasts forever, we would like to think that commercials have more than just a short-term effect. Most of the research done on the subject of commercial effectiveness deals with the short term (STAs) at the expense of the long-term (LTAs). The ADWORKS2 study concluded that commercials returned only .32 cents on the dollar for the most heavily advertised brands that were studied. That's a loss of .68 in profit on every dollar spent on advertising, that is if the effect of advertising is only felt in the short term. However, it is felt that baseline sales, repeat purchase economies of scale, the ability to spend less and get more are all values that are derived from advertising in the long run, not to mention brand equity in the broadest sense. Most of this has not been definitively measured, yet it is the very basis of traditional advertising thinking. We will see new research into LTAs very soon.

Point #10: We don't know yet, but surely we will be surprised

MTV taught us that life can get cluttered, fast-paced and discordanant and still be tolerable, even enjoyable. We are being retrained every day in our business as the pace of change continues to accelerate. In 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock, about the death of permanence and the exponential pace of change attendant to our times. It is no more than 30 years since then. We have navigated a lot of turbulence and embraced the rate of change as natural, though uncomfortable at times. Stand by for 2002.