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[Contn.] Cutting Through The Clutter Reaching the target right Back in the boom times, when the moolah was flowing and the going was good, things were simple. Suppose your brand was targeted at SEC A and B male consumers, going purely by demographics, you could safely choose prime time slots on Star Plus, Zee, or Sony, all of which offer optimal reach to your target audience. But during a slump, clients want to know how involved their target audience is with a particular programming. Says Rajul Kulshrestha, Associate Vice-President, Universal McCann: ''Even in SEC A and B, homes predominantly have single TV sets, so even if demographics covers your reach objectives, your target audience may be a passive viewer.''
Planners are, therefore, choosing slots more carefully. For its new Opel Swing campaign, primarily targeted at SEC A males, General Motors has stayed away from prime time slots on the three primary channels-Zee, Star Plus, and Sony-concentrating instead on news, sports, and more niche channels that are dominated by male viewers. The result: GM forks out a lower adspend, while building up the same reach figures. A 30-second spot on prime time on Star Plus, for instance, will set an advertiser back by Rs 9,60,000, while the same duration commercial will cost not even a tenth-Rs 71,000-on Star Movies, prime time. Small wonder that media planners are focusing more on researching how involved their target groups are. Agencies across the board-from McCann to Grey to O&M-are spending more on proprietary consumer involvement tools (See Tools Of The Trade) that help them measure media content preferences of target audiences. One such tool used by Universal McCann in the Mumbai market has a sample size that is bigger than TAM/INTAM's Peoplemeter, which is used to generate television rating points (TRPs). ''There is a shift from mere reach to awareness/involvement-led planning,'' says Satyajit Sen, Associate Vice-President, Grey Worldwide. Take cinema. In most metro markets, cinema can hardly stack up in terms of reach with television, yet, if the brand objective is to have a larger-than-life impact, a media planner can consider cinema over television. A one-minute cinema commercial running in four shows a day for one week costs just about Rs 40,000 in a market like Delhi, compared to the Rs 5,00,000 to Rs 9,60,000 a half-a-minute television spot would cost on any entertainment-driven television channel, such as Star Plus, Zee, or Sony. Pedigree Pet Food by Mars, for instance, is looking at cinema advertising very seriously. The brand, in its test-market Hyderabad, has taken eight cinema theatres, targeting SEC A women. Says Lowe Lintas' Iyer: ''Cinema is in sharp focus because SEC A audiences are going back to the medium in the top metros. And for the sheer brand experience that cinema provides, its costs are very effective.''
Closing in on the consumer Tough times mean tough questions from clients. Increasingly, advertisers want to know what is being bought with their money. Is it reaching numbers in print? GRPs (gross rating points) on TV? Admits Grey's Sen: ''The easiest thing for a media planner to achieve and show the advertiser is the GRPs or the reach numbers.'' For instance, if your target is 100 GRPs, you can achieve it by buying 10 spots in a programme with TRP 10 (10x10) or 20 spots in TRP 5-rated programme (20x5), and there could be umpteen number of such combinations. Likewise, you can buy reach with print in a specific geographical market by taking a combination of newspapers or magazines. But today the client wants to know more. Has his target audience actually seen the campaign? Was he at home when the commercial went on air?
The challenge for the media planner is, therefore, to attempt to capture the consumer at any available point. And conventional logic may not always hold good. Says McCann's Kulshrestha: ''The focus for us (media planners) today is to capture opportunities at all consumer contact points. Media definition for us, therefore, is not just TV or print, but retail, the screensavers that office workers stare at all day, bookmarks, tea-coasters, you name it...we at McCann believe that everything communicates''. Example: Wills Sport, the apparel brand from ITC Lifestyle, is reportedly spending almost 50 per cent of its advertising money on city-specific kiosks, which also act as navigational tools for its retail shops. Leveraging the medium Till three or four years ago, media planning was more about media buying than anything else. But now media planning is focusing more sharply on the consumer's decision-making process and the importance of media in that process. Says Lowe Lintas' Iyer: ''The role of a media planner is no longer confined to CPT (Cost Per Thousand) or TRPs, but strategic as well. Questions on which media has a better degree of conversion, building brand salience vis-à-vis activities at the point of sale, dictate a media planner's job as much as building media reach.'' For contraceptive brands Pearl and Masti, which were targeting an audience in SEC B, C, D and E in Hindi speaking states, O&M stretched a budget of Rs 4 crore by buying spots on Doordarshan, which not only reached the target audience but also offered a 40-second spot at the price for 10 seconds because the product had social benefits. Archies greeting cards, which target 15-24 year-olds, recently started putting as much as 15 per cent of its Rs 6-crore advertising budget on television news. ''We believe news as a genre of programming is happening and is the 'in-thing' with even young audiences. It is also an effort by us to extend our target audience to the 24-year plus,'' adds Anil Mulchandani, Archies' Chairman and Managing Director. Archies is an example of a brand's strategic intent to expand its target audience dictating the choice of media. Making media accountable
Welcome to the new age media planner. He's the guy who used to buy media for you. But now he also defines your audience, chooses the right vehicle to carry your campaign and best of all, helps you make the media you buy accountable. With advertisers increasingly worrying about how much bang their bucks get, media planners have begun using more efficient media evaluation matrices. Says Bashab Sarkar, Managing Consultant (North), The Media Network (division of O&M): ''Audience involvement scores are now weighted while arriving at return on investment of media spends.'' On their part, media planners today push media owners very hard to get good deals. Television channels like Sony and Star, have started offering channel-wide Cost Per Rating Point (CPRP) deals, which means advertisers pay for actual delivery of GRPs and not promised TRPs per programme. ''Almost 10-12 per cent of the deals, these days, are CPRP-led at the channel level,'' says Lintas' Iyer. You could also call it cash on delivery. What's more, though media planning's new age may have been spawned by a slowdown, such innovations in media planning are here to stay. Call that the message of the medium. 1 | 2 |
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