3 keys to success when planning campaigns on TV, radio and new digital platforms

For a while now, two major changes in audiovisual consumption have been gaining momentum, shaping the way advertisers design their media plans:

• Increasingly fragmented consumption due to the consolidation of on-demand in both TV and radio, and the emergence of countless digital platforms for both video and audio: OTTs, YouTube, Twitch, social media, podcasts and an endless etcetera.

• The gradual disappearance of “exclusive advertising niches” that existed for certain targets on some digital platforms. With the massive entry to the digital world of profiles that are much more mature and diverse, YouTube and other media are no longer the exclusive territory of young audiences. In fact, they have become as relevant as TV or radio in terms of number and diversity of profiles, although with a still smaller volume of viewers.

What does this mean for advertising activity?

We might think that impacting our current or potential clients effectively is increasingly complicated. But it need not be so. What predominates today is multi-exposure advertising on different platforms. And, seen in this light, this new paradigm allows us to play with much more artillery and achieve greater brand reach by following users over different platforms.

To deploy this entire arsenal, a single, cross-media method measuring all media with a single data source and on the same group of users is more necessary than ever. This single-source concept has been in the industry’s mind for many years, but had been technologically unobtainable until now.

Three keys to success:

In practical terms, if we put ourselves in the place of an advertiser who wants even more efficient campaign planning and management, there are three issues to take into account in the current context:

• It is vital to fully understand what incremental reach other media achieve over TV. We have spent years hearing about the imminent devaluation of TV as an audiovisual platform, but the reality is almost everyone watches television for at least a few minutes every day and it still reigns supreme among all profiles over the age of 18. Therefore, the challenge is to measure, analyze and choose what other media best compliment big TV campaigns depending on the objectives sought: to reinforce our brand among a younger target? to generate recurrent impact among seniors?

• The most efficient formula: measurement must tell us which medium best builds performance to generate incremental reach and frequencies on TV in our targets. And not only that: it should also tell us which of them does so most efficiently in terms of budget. Only a single-source method can answer questions such as: how many impressions do I need to generate reach? How much reach is incremental/exclusive? What is the campaign’s overall impact on its core target?

• Impact on KPIs and campaign recall: campaign analysis does not end with the measurement of performance. We must understand the impression it leaves, how it is valued and, most importantly, the impact it has on our brand. Asking for a random group’s opinion is an option, but what if we could distinguish between those who have been exposed and those who have not; where, how many times, what they are like, what they buy… without asking a single question? All these variables, which are really only accessible when you work with the same group of users all the time, should give us those clues to understand which medium helps us establish our campaign’s message, which one reinforces it among one target or another, how the campaign is valued depending on the media that have had an impact, how many impacts we need to improve perception…

If we put these three pieces together, we will find the perfect formula for reaching our target in the most appropriate and efficient way. Seen in this way, this context of multi-exposure and concurrence of targets could become a field full of opportunities.