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ADVERTISING Print + TV = Wow! Are you lavishing your adspend on TV? Viewers are zapping your commercials. Your audiences are smaller than ever before. And your costs for reaching your target-audience are rising exponentially. It is time to stop wasting your money. Are you using Print too? By Chhya
And we'll be back after a short break Isn't that how you watch TV? Isn't that how your customer watches TV too? The remote is the magic wand with which she makes your tele-ad disappear from her screen. Vanishing with every move of her thumb is the Rs 1.30 lakh that it costs to buy a 10-second spot on national prime-time TV. Suddenly, the efficacy of the huge adspends--Rs 1,969 crore in 1997--being poured by marketers into the medium with, unarguably, the widest reach in the country--1 out of every 2 homes, and 3 in 4 homes with incomes of over Rs 3,000 a month--is in doubt. For starters, captive audiences have been replaced by promiscuous programme-swappers. And, instead of the TRP (Television Rating Point), it is the hah (Hoping Against Hope) factor that is determining whether your customer will watch your commercial. Or not. If that isn't bad enough, there's more worrisome news for the TV-intensive advertiser.
We may be biased, but the only alternative? Return to your old favourite: Print.
It's time to pause, rewind, and replay your media-plan--as many consumer product brands are already doing:
True, the use of Print to supplement TV isn't exactly unprecedented. In fact, Titan Industries used it a decade ago when launching its watches. The difference, however, is that TV was not as ubiquitous then as it is now. Its all-pervasiveness has all but wiped other media off the planner's map as the primary choice for advertising consumer products. In fact, Print has, virtually, become a niche for technical, financial, and corporate advertising while TV occupies the high ground of brand-building. However, as the findings of some path-breaking research reveal, that could be a mistake.
BT explores the new paradigm of media-planning in the Multimedia Millennium. Why TV Viewership Is Shrinking No advertiser counts on TV as a single beam for reaching the mass market any more. The splintering of the medium into 60 channels, reaching India's 18 million C&S households, has long turned TV into a fragmented vehicle for communication. Only, advertisers and media-planners assumed that a high-viewership channel, even if it no longer delivers as many eyeballs as it used to, still reaches sufficiently large numbers of people to be a cost-effective means of advertising. False.
Most important, the popular channels carry focused content--science and nature from Discovery and National Geographic, English language feature-films and serials from Star World and AXN, movies from Star Movies and Zee Cinema, sports from Star Sports and ESPN--thus carving up the audience into mutually exclusive segments. There's regional divisioning too, with Sun TV, Eenadu TV, Asianet, and Gemini TV dominating the southern-languages-speaking viewership while ATN Bengali and Punjabi World hook the Bengali and the Punjabi, respectively.
Getting fragmented, along with the viewership, are the TRPs that any channel can generate. Explains Ashish Bhasin, 34, President, Initiative Media, the media-buying arm of Ammirati Puris Lintas: "Ten years ago, a programme could get between 60 and 80 TRPs. Four years ago, it had halved to 30. Today, we're being forced to look at single-digit TRPs." He's right. Five years ago, the 3 top-rated C&S programmes had TRPs of as high as 30; their counterparts today can boast of not more than 12 TRPs. Advertisers, of course, measure their targets in Gross Rating Points (GRPs), calculated as the product of the TRP of a programme on which a commercial appears and the number of times it is aired. Logically, since TRPs have dropped three-fold, advertisers must increase the intensity of their advertising by the same degree to protect their GRPs. Naturally, more advertising means more expenditure. That's not the only bitter fruit of fragmentation. The multiplicity of viewing-options has also raised the average viewing-hours from 2 to 4 a day. In other words, a commercial now has twice as many competitors as before vying for the customer's attention. Complains Chandana Mittra, 36, Director (Media Services), HTA: "Thanks to increased viewing-hours, the viewer is getting bombarded with more messages. So, the chances of recall are far less than before." Add to that the spectre of being zapped. Blanking out a commercial in favour of programming on another channel has reached such high proportions that continuous-tracking devices like the people-meters--which monitor viewership in real time instead of relying on recall--are reporting major drops in viewership as soon as an ad is aired. Admits P.R.P. Nair, 50, Senior Vice-President (Media Services), RK Swamy/BBDO: "For the first time, we can evaluate the viewership of commercials. And we're discovering, to our horror, that it is, at times, 50 per cent lower than the programme-viewership." Moreover, some channels are naturally prone to floating viewerships, which lowers both the probability of a commercial being watched, and the target-customer's staying with it when it is aired. According to an analysis of TV programmes conducted by RK Swamy/BBDO, the stability of viewership is high on mass-entertainment channels like Zee TV or set, where the fluctuation peaks at 20 per cent. But, when it comes to the music channels, like MTV or Channel [V], it can be as high as 100 per cent.
The combined results of these assaults: a distinct weakening of the impact of advertising on TV. And, most important, the setting in of the Law of Diminishing Returns. Or, a progressive increase, rather than a fall, in the cost of every unit of gain in viewership after crossing a borderline. Why Using TV Is More Expensive "We have found that reaching an audience of beyond 50 per cent of the target-group for a mass consumer product becomes very difficult, if not impossible. And it is very expensive," acknowledges Praveen Tripathi, 41, Associate Regional Director (Media & Strategic Planning), Chaitra Leo-Burnett. For any brand, given the TRPs achievable on a particular channel and time-slot, the viewership peaks at a particular proportion of the target-audience for that brand. To communicate to a higher number than that, the advertiser has to increase the number of spots exponentially. With the result that the cost of reaching every additional chunk of customers keeps rising. To illustrate the point, HTA's Mittra personally conducted an exercise for BT in buying time on TV for advertising a brand with different targets--measured as a proportion of the target-audience--for delivering 3+ exposures. The assumption: the commercials were directed at a target of 34.30 million women in the 15+ age-group in the socio-economic groups A, B, and C (roughly, those with monthly incomes of Rs 1,500 and above). The findings reveal just how expensive it gets to stretch reach through TV once the threshold has been crossed. Consider, first, the economics of reaching all TV homes. Using an optimised TRP-based media-plan, the cost of reaching 30 per cent of the target-audience was most economical when 50 per cent had been reached. At this level, the cost per percentage point stood at Rs 1.60 lakh--lower than the Rs 1.84 lakh needed to reach 45 per cent, and the Rs 1.86 lakh needed to reach 30 per cent. Beyond the 50 per cent-mark, however, the cost per percentage point rose dramatically. In order to achieve a reach of 60 per cent, the advertiser had to spend Rs 2.16 lakh per percentage point--going up to Rs 2.56 lakh for a reach of 65 per cent, and Rs 3.15 lakh for the peak reach of 73 per cent. The conclusion: the incremental cost of using TV balloons once the economy ceiling is pierced. Repeating the exercise using C&S households produced an even-sharper pattern. With the size of the target-audience scaled down to 17.80 million women because of the smaller universe covered by families with access to C&S TV, the cost per percentage point keeps rising: from Rs 1 lakh for 30 per cent of the target to Rs 1.74 lakh for 70 per cent. And the jump is exponential thereafter, hitting Rs 2.23 lakh to achieve the maximum reach of 73 per cent. As media-planners are realising, splintered TV-viewing is making for expensive media-buying. The crucial question: isn't there a cheaper way to achieve the same reach? Cannot other media be used alongside TV? Says Meenakshi Madhvani, 40, the CEO of Carat India, the specialist media-buying agency: "Five years ago, people were not happy working with TV programmes or channels unless they delivered to millions of viewers. Today, we have come down from millions to thousands. So, you have to change the way you are looking at other media--like Print." Bang on. Why Using Print Is Cost-Smart
Sure, classic communication theory says that TV--with its ability to touch 2 senses and make a beeline for both the intellect and emotion--is for brand-building. And Print, with its USP being the facilitation of content-heavy communication--you can take as long as you like over a Print ad, but you can't do the same with a TV commercial--is for announcement advertising. However, those hypotheses were formulated when no one was looking at the bottomline. Cost-equations are now forcing the new paradigm of media-multiplication. Used atop TV, Print is turning out to be the more cost-effective medium for increasing reach beyond the threshold, making their use in conjunction a more customer-focused option than using either singly. Adds Carat's Madhvani: "Our research shows that the incremental impact of Print on TV can be as high as 60 per cent although it can go as low as 10 per cent too." That's not just a quantitative argument; the qualitative principles of communication suggest as much. Beyond a psychologically-perceived saturation level, using the same medium for a message can dull the impact of the communication, shrinking the additional gain from the extra use of the medium. Points out Jasmine Sorabhji, 35, Vice-President (Media), Trikaya Grey: "The net takeout of Print Plus TV is higher than that of TV alone. It is not just a matter of adding the numbers, it is also a question of the qualitative impact." Switch to a new medium once the saturation-level has been achieved--and the impact will widen. Media-planners call it the media-multiplier effect, expressing the process through a simple equation: 2 + 2 = 5. Elaborates M. Suku, 37, Head (Media Services), Colgate-Palmolive: "Worldwide, adding Print to TV is the route that advertisers are taking." Adds Roda Mehta, 54, Chairperson, Media Research Users' Council (MRUC): "This strategy didn't start with the current scenario of splintered viewership. It is something we have been promoting ever since there was multimedia." Still, consumer-product marketers will have to change their mindsets to accept the possibility of using Print to target their customers. Conventional thinking has always kept FMCG advertising, in particular, skewed heavily in favour of TV on the assumption that Print does not lend itself to the kind of ephemeral value-propositioning around which consumer brands are built. That's why, as adspend data for 11 FMCG categories--shampoos, hair-oils, toilet-soaps, cold-creams, toothpastes, washing-powders, biscuits, coffee, tea, sauces, and soft-drinks--collected by ORG-MARG reveals, the money spent on TV advertising is between 20 and 70 times more than that spent on Print. By contrast, for consumer durables, where features- and promotion-led advertising means a preponderance of announcements, Print accounts for upto 70 per cent of the media-spend in many cases--and seldom under 30 per cent. Admits Kalpana Sathe, 40, Head (Media Services), Ogilvy & Mather (O&M): "Print has been ignored by FMCG marketers, who are yet to see the benefits of the medium." Those very benefits are evident in the studies conducted by IMRB and ORG-MARG to explore the value that Print advertising adds to TV advertising. Why Print + TV Works Better Working under rigid conditions, the IMRB study exposed purposively-chosen panels of consumers--comprising 900 home-makers aged between 28 and 44 years in the socio-economic classes A and B--to 3 different media strategies. The first panel was exposed to just TV ads for 3 different FMCGs: a brand of shampoo, a brand of toilet-soap, and a brand of talcum powder. The second to Print ads only in the daily newspapers. And the third to ads on both TV and in newspapers. A fourth panel was exposed to Print ads in only magazines while the fifth was exposed to ads on TV and in magazines. The number of ads, of course, was adjusted depending on the media; for instance, the TV-only panel watched more TV commercials than the TV-plus-Print panel did. All the panels were then questioned on their recall of both the brand as well as the product-category. The results? Where brand-recall in a particular product-category was concerned--consumers were specifically asked whether they recalled ads in each category--those who had been exposed to both Print and TV ads consistently responded with the highest recall-levels as compared to the TV-only, newspapers-only, and magazines-only panels. Take the results of advertising on TV and newspapers as opposed to TV alone. This yielded recall-levels that were 23.40 percentage points higher for the shampoo, 6.10 points for the toilet-soap, and 5 points for the talcum powder brands. Switch to the TV-plus-magazine option-- and check the results: leads of 26.10 points for the shampoo, 3.90 points for the toilet-soap, and 1.80 points for the talcum powder brands. As for unaided brand-recall--consumers were simply asked to list all the brands they remembered--Print-plus-TV outscored TV in all cases except the 0.20 percentage point higher recall achieved by the talcum powder ads on TV. Everywhere else, it was the media-multiplier strategy that seemed to work best, delivering leads of 21.30 points for the shampoo brand (when advertised on TV-and-newspapers), of 8.70 points for the toilet-soap brand, and 9 points for the talcum powder brand. And when advertised on TV and magazines, the shampoo brand achieved 24.50 points higher recall than when on TV alone while the toilet-soap brand had a lead of 5.50 points. The bottomline: the results of using both media--TV and Print--were clearly superior to those of using either. Of course, recall may not equal retail. And the real evidence of the power of a media-multiplier strategy must lie in the actual sales of the brands advertised this way. To audit the impact, ORG-MARG, in association with Chaitra Leo-Burnett, examined the purchase-patterns of the consumers who had been exposed to the different media strategies in accordance with the IMRB's panel-led exercise. Says Chaitra Leo-Burnett's Tripathi: "It was crucial to establish the business-generating potential of the different strategies. After all, a marketer is putting in money and wants returns. We have to look at everything from that point of view." The results show that recall, in this case, does, indeed, translate into retail along the same contours. In the case of new brands, purchases were found to be much higher when the consumer was exposed to both TV and Print ads than when she was exposed to TV alone. Out of the 12 brands examined, 7 were bought more by those who watched the double-media ads--and 2, in the same proportion--while only 3 brands found more buyers among the TV-only consumers. In the case of existing brands, purchases were found to be, more or less, equal in both cases--a finding that the researchers attribute to the fact that their recall must have been influenced by earlier advertising. However, the tilt in favour of a media-multiplier strategy was obvious. Avers Punitha Arumugam, 33, Director (Media Services), Madison DMB&B: "Internationally, in TV-strong markets, marketshare growth is always higher when you use a multimedia approach." Given the cost-mathematics, the returns are better too. Why Print Provides Focus
Since most products are far from achieving complete penetration even in these 2 classes, using media that reaches them alone is sufficient for spreading brand-awareness among target-consumers. Says Madhvani: "Only match-boxes have achieved 100 per cent penetration, and detergents, 90 per cent. All other products have poor penetration. So, the advertiser is still looking, essentially, at the literate customer." What's more, with literacy levels rising, the penetration of Print is growing too, increasing the reach it can offer. Money spent on advertising through Print, therefore, is hardly ever wasted by being directed at people outside the universe of customers--unlike TV. Agrees MRUC's Mehta: "For many products, Print certainly offers the kind of audience you are looking at. A lot of these fundamentals for building brands are being by-passed in the desire to be only on TV." That's why, although its advertising for Goodday cookies is TV-led, Britannia uses Print for additional reach, using a daily Goodday's Thought For The Day snippet above the weather report in the national dailies. Explains Vikram Kaushik, 47, Vice-President (Marketing & Exports), Britannia: "For reach and awareness, TV is best. But Print can dimensionalise the brand." Of course, using Print on top of TV will not really bring new customers into the communication unless the overlap between the target-universes is low. Fortunately, research shows that there is a significant group of people who are, in the parlance of media-planners, Print-heavy but TV-light. According to a study conducted by the Indian Newspaper Society in 1997, TV delivers the best results when the target-audience is either the middle-market mass, is dominated by women, the unemployed, or the relatively less-educated. Print, however, serves up the up-market, the better-educated, and the predominantly male segments more effectively. Adds Tripathi: "Even for homemakers, if we have to reach out to the up-market, affluent, or educated among them, it makes intuitive sense to use Print." Indeed, using Print is, sometimes, a necessity to ensure that every segment of the target-audience is covered. That's what the media-planners at O&M discovered when planning the advertising for Hindustan Lever Ltd's (HLL) Pond's skin-care range. Having segmented the customers for the products, and mapping different media onto those segments--using surrogate brand-consumption as a tool--the team discovered that the classic channel for the advertising, TV, was not reaching out widely enough. Recalls K.V. Balasubramaniam, 32, Managing Consultant (Media Services), O&M: "We discovered that the impact of Print was much more than we had imagined because TV was not scoring in some of the literate segments. Even in the case of semi-literates, it was absolutely necessary to bring vernacular publications into our plan." It is in recognition of the same facts that HLL, for instance, is running cricket-related contests for its Clinic All Clear brand of shampoo--which uses cricketers Ajay Jadeja and Rahul Dravid for celebrity endorsements--in the newspapers although the brand will be advertised heavily on TV during World Cup 99. Explains B. Venkataramanan, 42, Group Media Manager, HLL: "We need to do this because there'll always be some cricket enthusiasts without access to TV, and some who do not tune in at all." Obviously, marketing strategy is making the media-multiplier strategy a necessity. In the past, the brand-building efforts of FMCGs were, inevitably, focused on intangible, feel-good benefits, appealing more to right-brain desire than to left-brain reason. Not any more. Given the intensity of the competition, consumer softs have to establish hard reasons-to-buy--which, in turn, demands a high level of cognition. The ideal medium for such rational cognition is, of course, Print. For, TV cannot accommodate the plethora of detail and technical initiation to their benefits that brands are being forced to resort to. Adds K.V. Sridhar, 40, Executive Creative Director, Chaitra Leo-Burnett: "Unless a TV commercial is entertaining, it is so fleeting that it becomes increasingly difficult for an FMCG brand to stand out. While this is true even for Print, you can use the medium more interestingly." Sure, many companies prefer to use Print as a pointer or a reminder of their TV commercials, often using the same visual and punchline. But, as V. Ramani, 37, Director, Euro-RSCG, points out: "If you do that, you're using the media multiplier, but not maximising consumer take-out. Why would you lose the opportunity of a multiplied consumer take-out? The two messages in the two media should be complementary, and dovetail with each other." Working in conjunction, the two deliveries will then be able to serve up better numbers as well as sharper impact and greater comprehension. Says Mehta: "The importance of Print is in the capacity of being absorbed; the capacity to mull over what you are reading." Add to that the benefits of having a readership which, because of the editorial content of the medium, is already primed for messages that are synergised with the reading-material. Adds Divya Gupta, 34, National Media Director, BatesClarion: "The power of niche publications, which address specific profiles of readers, are useful for targeting your customer too." Does the rediscovered power of Print signal a shift of adspend away from TV? Yes--and no. For, the winning media strategy is not to move from one medium to another, but to use them in conjunction for optimal benefits. And the smart marketer will seize victory by managing to distribute his advertising rupee in just the right ratio between Print and TV so as to press home the ad-vantage. Clearly, Print + TV is always better than TV alone. |
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Three pieces of seminal new research on consumer behaviour conclude that the
results of concentrating all your adspend on TV are, simply, sub-optimal. In a nutshell,
you are not getting the biggest bang from your buck if you lavish it all on the box.
(Caveat: two of these studies were commissioned by Living Media (India), the publishers of
Business Today, and the Times Of India Group, both of which are, primarily, print giants.)
The truth is that as viewers distribute their attention between different
channels, the viewership of your commercial has dropped drastically. From a basic bouquet
of choices between Doordarshan--whose viewership has long been limited primarily to the 37
million households without access to C&S--Zee TV, and Sony Entertainment Television
(SET) for entertainment, backed by one sports channel and one music channel, the palette
has now become multi-hued. 
The options for cost-conscious (read: all)
advertisers are clear: either cap your reach at the most cost-effective level for TV,
sacrificing the chance of communicating with the rest. Or seek out a different medium to
reach the others, optimising the combined cost. The additional media: Print. 
Print offers the crucial benefit of focus: limited,
by its very nature, to the literate, it is mapped to a more affluent set of customers than
TV is. In fact, according to both the National Readership Survey, 1998, and the Indian
Readership Survey, 1997, TV is only marginally--no more than 5 percentage points--ahead of
Print in terms of reach in the socio-economic classes A and B. Moreover, given the
hard-to-dispute assumption that only those in and above the middle-class can afford
newspapers every day--and an even-smaller subset, magazines--the estimated 187 million
people that Print reaches out to virtually amount to the entire section of targetable
consumers in the country. According to the demographic classification of consumers by the
National Council of Applied Economic Research, the top 2 sets of consumers--the Very Rich
and the Consuming Classes--add up to 156 million people. 