Reach is hot. It’s getting some well-deserved love in this fragmented media landscape for good reason: Companies typically grow by expanding their customer base, not by getting current customers to buy more often.
“The research shows that if you have an effective advertising campaign, your No. 1 priority should be to reach as many people with that campaign as possible.” — David Poltrack CBS’ Chief Research Officer
“You clearly need your broad reach of vehicles from an awareness perspective.” — Allison Miazga-Bedrick, North American Marketing Director of the Chocolate Filled Bar Brands Portfolio at Mars
“It’s very clear for fast-moving consumer goods that there’s a direct correlation between reach and sales, so we need to map out the right reach.” — Efrain Ayala, Social Media & Mobile Manager/North America & Europe for Reckitt Benckiser
“The focus is on reach and continuity.” — Marc Pritchard Chief Brand Officer at P&G
This can be an extremely positive development for radio but there is another aspect of “reach” we might also want to touch upon when meeting with clients.
Bill Harvey, a much-accomplished and respected media executive/researcher/consultant, touched upon a concept he referred to as “reach velocity” in a
blog last year. Harvey provided data that suggested the speed at which reach is generated impacts ROI, with faster being better. Harvey wrote, “If two exposures are delivered in the two days before a shopping trip, this doubles to triples the sales effect.”
He continued: “If reach is high, but it
built up slowly – say, if you put all of your money into monthly magazines (not to knock their value in other dimensions), then in any two-day period the percentage who received messages will be low.
Why did I bother to mention a “two-day” period?
The
Ebbinghaus forgetting curve describes the temporal footprint of advertising’s effectiveness – it drops off sharply for the first two days, and then gradually after that.”
In his follow-up
blog Harvey concluded, “This means there is reason to employ fast-reach media vehicles as a core to one’s schedule if one is a CPG brand. In all likelihood, this applies to all product categories to some degree as well, but probably applies most to high-velocity categories.”
There are a couple of marketing tenets at play in Harvey’s blogs. First, the reason why high “reach velocity” is important is that buying never stops, so it is in an advertiser’s best interest to minimize the time gap between each purchase occasion and the last advertising brand exposure.
The second is that most advertising serves to “remind” and not “teach,” which highlights the importance of “mental availability,” as the more often a product comes to mind in buying situations, the more often it’ll be purchased.
The third is, while advertising does have a “lagged” effect, there does soon come a point – Harvey’s data suggests within two days – when it needs to be refreshed.
All three are foundational to Erwin Ephron’s recency planning theory.
“Reach velocity” plays to three key radio’s strengths:
– Near daily usage (according to Nielsen 5.1 days/week).
– Frequency of daily use, 3.5x/day (Arbitron stat prior to the Nielsen purchase).
– Resonance. Radio enables an advertiser to achieve efficient continuity, which fits nicely into Harvey’s two-day window.
We can also enhance radio’s “reach velocity” via the integration of 10s and 15s to supplement 30s or 60s, broad use of all dayparts as well as road-blocking commercial pods across stations.
Much radio advertising promotes time-sensitive or call-to-action events where reach, not frequency, should be the primary goal. Radio, via its 93% weekly usage and 97% monthly usage, has always been able to deliver the reach, now we can highlight another dimension and benefit of this metric in which radio also excels.
Bob McCurdy is The Vice President of Sales for The Beasley Media Group and can be reached at bob.mccurdy@bbgi.com
Does
“Creative” = Wasted Effort?
April 17, 2017
From time to time, a local station will crank out a brilliant
piece of creative advertising. The staff will gather around, howling with
delight while offering kudos all around. “Let’s enter it for an award!” they
will exclaim. Salespeople will hold their tongues and grudgingly wince out a
qualified smile as they wonder to themselves: “Nice. But, will it sell
anything?”
It can’t be effectively defended that a “direct response” ad
won’t work – at least to some degree. Of course it will work – again, to some
degree. It is also true that the copy for these ads can be pulled off a
template and produced in just a few minutes. The advertisers want little else
and audiences expect little else. The sales folks are also part of this
unacknowledged agreement. They, too, expect little else. Some might enjoy a
little “creative” to take to the street on occasion. But, they won’t be holding
their breath, either.
For “creative” to be appreciated and preferred, a number of
elements have to be considered and understood, first. That these issues have
yet to be put to bed, tucked in, and kissed has always left me baffled. I have
always flaunted the idea that properly constructing “creative” is a more
effective approach to radio advertising. Neither have I spent the totality of
my radio career in Rakabakastan.
My “thing” in this space has been about making huge improvements
in the writing and delivery of those very same “direct response” ads –
something else that radio refuses to consider, never mind undertake. I have
also been promoting the idea that on-air presenters are, likewise, desperately
in need of similar improvements.
Here then, is a reminder of what radio advertising must include
in order to be as effective as possible:
·
Gain and maintain audience attention. This is not
as simple as it might seem. An audible beer-fart will get an audience’s
attention. The challenge is about what happens after that.
·
Generate an appropriate and previously chosen emotional
response from the audience.
·
And, if the advertiser is a stickler for such things,
introduce the brand and/or the advertiser’s offer.
I believe most astute readers would agree that the capacity to
accomplish all three of these (above) elements in a standard “direct response”
ad is severely limited – right out of the chute. We are all stuck with the
required, traditional form: “Tell ‘em who you are and how terrific you are.
Tell ‘em what the ‘deal’ is. Tell ‘em how much it’s not going to cost. Tell ‘em
to buy now. Then, tell ‘em again.”
I accept the reality that even this banal, superficial,
insulting, and boorish approach has effects. This has been radio’s
bread-and-butter reality for many decades. Having made no significant
improvements, if any, however, leaves radio exactly where we have been for
those decades – stuck in the glue.
Radio is in a position to consider more and better sales-oriented
materials. The potentials to improve on revenues through more effective sales
presentations are improving on a regular basis. For some, that happenstance
would be cause for relief, maybe even celebration.
The material that hits the air, however, has been carved and
left in a small park on the side of the road as if it were a stone memorial for
lost opportunities. Any station that can make even subtle improvements in the
quality and influence of its locally produced commercial content will
have access to even better results for its advertisers.
Creative radio commercials might be recognized, one day, as a
gold standard and a necessary component of successfully effective radio
advertising. However, this proposal has been discounted by the industry as no
more than a cute, novelty strategy. “Creative is all right,” they would say,
“as long as producing it doesn’t take up time and resources.”
The suppression of “creative” radio advertising is also
indicative of a more general approach to broadcast communications. Available,
updated processes in the writing of “direct response” ads have also been
bottom-shelved and forgotten in some recess of the janitorial supply room. The
same can be said for the attention paid to the communication skills of the
on-air folks.
