For Their Eyes Only

For years, TV networks made their fortunes through mass advertising. But the last 10 years have seen marketers shift away from the shotgun approach to use ad dollars more wisely by pinpointing their audience’s favorite shows and basing media buys on demographic data.

That change came in large part due to cable TV, which offered niche programming and, therefore, niche audiences and more targeted advertising options. But marketers still make basic assumptions about TV audiences: marketers target teenage boys via Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while cooking products opt for The Food Network.

Now, advertisers are trying to drill down even more, which has agencies racing to create a proprietary analysis tool that lets clients further identify what shows best speak to a specific audience.

The information networks supply about their viewers isn’t good enough anymore. “I’d say the biggest change is that many top marketers and agencies no longer use demographics for media planning, but have adopted very proprietary models for measuring the impact of media buys,” says Joe Mandese, editor of Media Buyer’s Daily, New York City. “The media still operate on historical, one-dimensional lingo that is usually based on age/sex demos with occasional geographics and lifestyle stuff thrown in. Brand managers and strategic planning agencies generally use their own criteria and only consider network data as a tactical matter when negotiating [air] buys.”

Hence, the rush to improve proprietary research. Media buying agencies from New York City-based MindShare and Zenith Media to Chicago’s Starcom subscribe to their own continually evolving methods of program analysis that use ratings data, audience data, and plain old guessing to come up with a reasoning model that best matches media bucks with the right audience.

But in the trenches, media buyers still cling to hit shows as the silver bullet, despite the fickleness of today’s viewers. “When it comes to the size of an audience, then you have to guesstimate,” says Steve Calandra, senior partner/managing director at J. Walter Thompson’s MindShare. “It’s hard to tell what the hits will be.”

The stakes are big. There are 105.5 million TV households in the U.S. for the 2001-2002 season, up 3.3 million from last season, per Nielsen Media Research, New York City. Women 18-plus dominate the landscape at 107.1 million viewers (compared to 98.6 million men over 18). “Women are easier to target simply because they tend to be heavier TV viewers than men,” says Calandra.

Beyond Gender

Research amalgamator Spectra, Chicago, offers highly detailed viewer profiles through its MediaPlan service. Its analysis assigns “volume rating points” to define a program’s potential to reach the heavy buyers of a specific category or brand. Spectra combines research from companies including Information Resources, Inc., NPD Group’s Q Scores, MRI, and sister company and TV ratings tabulator Nielsen Media Research.

“The advertising industry doesn’t need more data,” says Rob Carstens, executive vp of Spectra/MediaPlan. “It needs a way to use the data it already has more effectively. We’re attaching a metric that allows you to put a value to a brand.”

MediaPlan goes beyond ratings and demo data to identify the buying habits of households tuning into, say, 60 Minutes. (PROMO readers who follow the periodic Spectra Spotlight see this in action.) The company overlays household purchase data to extrapolate the buying habits of households watching specific shows (see chart, pg. 20). For instance, households that watch 60 Minutes buy a higher-than-average volume of beer and aspirin, according to Spectra.

Spectra also can start with the brand and find shows that appeal to its top users. To pinpoint heavy shampoo buyers, Spectra analyzed network and cable programs (see chart, pg. 20), then indexed all shows to identify where the volume-buying was. (WWF Entertainment and Fox’s King of the Hill indexed highest; CBS’s JAG and 48 Hours posted lowest.)

One caveat: The data tracks households, not individual viewers. So the person watching WWF Smackdown may not be the decision-maker buying — or using, for that matter — all that shampoo. That’s why Spectra presents the service as a supplement to more traditional demographic viewership data.

One Spectra client, a small packaged goods brand struggling to gain a foothold despite a tight budget and ad slots that were running during second-rate programming, used MediaPlan to determine that expensive prime-time and more affordable daytime programming drew equal numbers of its potential customers. So the brand swapped the primetime buys with daytime runs augmented by cable, saving 19 percent on ad spending while boosting target reach by 20 percent and frequency by 40 percent, says Spectra.

“For the amount of money spent on a 30-second spot, we can take a mass advertising campaign and understand what vehicles work most effectively,” says Carstens.

Spectra is working with 12 corporations representing 50 brands, with packaged goods accounting for about 85 percent, says Carstens. Growing categories include electronics, fast food, and pharmaceuticals.

Still, some industry observers have a mixed opinion on whether such a model is providing real advantages. “The concept is good,” says Calandra. “The problem is, it stretches the research beyond its limitations. Taking a sample size of viewers and applying it to the whole audience is risky.”

But in the days of unlimited channels and remote control, advertisers will take any edge they can get. And hey, Nielsen has been doing it for years.

PROMO 2002 Sampling Chart Addendum (Add these programs to our September chart.)